Effects of Polysemous Words on Sentence Comprehension

Abstract

The effect on comprehension of words containing more than one meaning was studied.In Experiment 1 subjects in grades 4, 5, and 6 were assessed on their ability to recall polysemous words and identify their meanings after having read them in sentence contexts.When words were assigned their primary sense in the sentences, subjects remembered them and their meanings better than when they had been used in a secondary sense.There were reading ability effects but no grade differences.Experiments 2 and 3 confirmed the inability of third and fourth grade children to use context to identify secondary meanings of words.Experiment 3 showed, in addition, that children cannot assess accurately whether they have chosen a correct meaning for a word.The three experiments indicate that children in elementary school frequently misremember the context when a secondary meaning of the word is referenced in a sentence and also fail to choose correct secondary meanings.It is apparent that the presence of polysemous words in text materials is one source of comprehension difficulty.