EFFECTS OF POLYSEMY IN LEXICAL DECISION AND NAMING - AN ALTERNATIVE TO LEXICAL ACCESS ACCOUNTS

The effects of polysemy (number of meanings) and word frequency were e xamined in lexical decision and naming tasks. Polysemy effects were ob served in both tasks. In the lexical decision task, high- and low-freq uency words produced identical polysemy effects. In the naming task, h owever, polysemy interacted with frequency, with polysemy effects bein g limited to low-frequency words. When degraded stimuli were used in b oth tasks, the interaction appeared not only in naming but also in lex ical decision. Because stimulus degradation also produced an effect of spelling-sound regularity in the lexical decision task, the different relationships between polysemy and frequency appear to be due to whet her responding was based primarily on orthographic or phonological cod es. As such, the effects of polysemy seem to be due to the nature of t ask-specific processes. An explanation in terms of M. S. Seidenberg an d J. L. McClelland's (1989) and D. C. Plaut and J. L. McClelland's (19 93) parallel distributed processing models is proposed.