Homograph norms: An alternative approach to determining meaning dominance

Abstract

In the present study, we provide a new technique for the collection of homograph norms that reduces subjectivity in the determination of meaning dominance by allowing participants rather than experimenters to indicate to which meaning or meanings the associates were related. To evaluate the effectiveness of this new technique, a subset of homograph norms were used in three separate experiments, demonstrating that (1) when presented with additional meaning categories, participants classified the associates consistently into the primary and secondary meaning categories; (2) overall, the participants were most familiar with primary meanings, followed by secondary, tertiary, and quaternary meanings; and (3) the meaning categories provided to the participants during norms collection were appropriate, since the two meanings provided for each homograph by the participants were consistent with the original data. Finally, in a fourth experiment, we compared the results of this new technique with a parallel set collected in Australia. The high degree of similarity in the results provides validity for this procedure. The homograph norms discussed in this article may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.