Effects of Polysemous Words on Sentence Comprehension

Abstract

THE EFFECT ON COMPREHENSION of words containing more than one meaning was studied. In Experiment I children in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades were assessed on their ability to recall polysemous words and identify their meanings after having read them in sentences. When words are placed in contexts which support their most common meanings, subjects remember the words and are more accurate in selecting the meanings than when the contexts support the less common meanings. Experiments 2 and 3 confirm the inability of third and fourth grade children to choose the less common meanings from disambiguating sentence contexts. Experiment 3 also indicates that adding a memory condition severely affects low ability readers' performance. In general, children in the middle elementary grades often incorrectly recall the context when a secondary meaning of the word is referenced in a sentence and either do not know less common meanings of words or fail to attend to the necessary contextual clues. It is apparent that word polysemy in reading tasks is a potential source of comprehension difficulty.