MEANING DOMINANCE NORMS FOR 120 HOMOGRAPHS

Over the past two decades, homographs have been used in psychological experiments aimed at testing a variety of theoretical issues concernin g memory and language. Often, such research requires prior knowledge o f the dominance relations among various meanings of the homographs. Pr eviously available homograph meaning norms are limited because they ar e now more than 10 years old, and they have typically reported only th e two most dominant meanings even though many homographs have three or more common meanings. This paper presents normative data on 120 homog raphs from a relatively large, heterogeneous sample of subjects (N = 1 00). Meaning dominance was assessed by having subjects write the first definition that came to mind for each homograph. Definition responses were grouped by similarity, and the resulting meaning categories were verified against dictionary meaning classifications. The number of di stinct meanings varied from two to six for the homographs investigated , and frequency of response is reported for all definition categories.