Multiple word meanings and lexical search speed

The task required the subjects to make a word-nonword decision to a visually presented item. The dependent measure was decision latency. The items were words with either a high or a low number of meanings and lawful nonwords. Two experiments indicated that words with a high number of meanings produced reliably shorter decision times. The interpretation of the results was that words with multiple meanings have multiple memory entries, and the search process terminates with detection of one of the entries.