Homographic entries in the internal lexicon: Effects of systematicity and relative frequency of meanings

The task was to distinguish between English and nonsense words, which were displayed singly. The display persisted until S pressed the yes-key if he thought the stimulus was English or the no-key if he thought it was nonsense. In an earlier study ( Rubenstein, Garfield, & Millikan, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1970 ) it was found that the response time is shorter when the English word is a homograph, a word with more than one meaning, than when it is a nonhomograph. The data of the present study showed that this facilitating effect of homography is observable when the meanings of the homograph (a) are not systematically related and (b) tend to equiprobability.