Semantic Priming Effect of Korean Lexical Ambiguity: A Comparison of Homonymy and Polysemy

한국어의 어휘적 중의성의 의미점화효과: 동음이의어와 다의어의 비교

The present study was conducted to explore how the processing of lexical ambiguity between homonymy and polysemy differs from each other, and whether the representation of mental lexicon was separated from each lexical ambiguity by a semantic priming paradigm. Homonymy (M1 means the literal meaning of '사과', i.e. apple and M2 means another literal meaning of '사과', i.e. apologize) was used in Experiment I, and polysemy (M2 means the literal meaning of '바람', i.e. wind and M2 means the figurative meaning of '바람', i.e. wanton) was used in Experiment 2. The results of both experiments showed that a significant semantic priming effect occurs regardless of the type of ambiguities (homonymy and polysemy) and the difference of their semantic processes. However, the semantic priming effect for polysemy was larger than that for homonymy. This result supports the hypothesis that the semantic process of homonymy is different from that of polysemy.