A normative study about lexical ambiguity in Spanish, in children and adults.

Abstract

Spanish norms for 113 ambiguous words are presented in this paper. Participants, children and adults, were asked to write all the meanings for each word they know and use. For each stimulus, a series of psycholinguistic parameters were calculated: the content and the number of meanings of each ambiguous word, as well as the percentage of participants who answered each meaning to determine the relative frequency and dominance of meanings; word length, printed lexical frequency, and subjective familiarity. These norms would be useful for research into cognitive and developmental psychology as well as other more applied fields, since this study extends previous data base in Spanish and provide information about lexical ambiguity either in children or adults native speakers.