This paper revisits the effect of lexical ambiguity in word recognition, which has been controversial as previous research reported advantage, disadvantage, and null effects. We discuss factors that were not consistently treated in previous research (e.g., the level of lexical ambiguity investigated, parts of speech of the experimental stimuli, and the choice of non-words) and report on a lexical decision experiment with Chinese nouns in which ambiguous nouns with homonymic and/or metaphorical meanings were contrasted with unambiguous nouns. An ambiguity advantage effect was obtained-Chinese nouns with multiple meanings were recognized faster than those with only one meaning. The results suggested that both homonymic and metaphorical meanings are psychologically salient semantic levels actively represented in the mental lexicon. The results supported a probability-based model of random lexical access with multiple meanings represented by separate semantic nodes. We further discuss these results in terms of lexical semantic representation and how different experimental paradigms result in different ambiguity effects in lexical access.

3Decades of lexical ambiguity research has rigorously studied effects of relative sense frequency on sense disambiguation in biased contexts, while fundamental semantic issues such as distinction of different types of ambiguities, or influences from lexical meanings' semantic nature (e.g., literal or metaphorical) as well as these meanings' degrees of conventionalization, have received less attention. In particular, while previous experimental works tend to focus on stimuli having dominant concrete meanings, a large amount of words having dominant abstract meanings are overlooked. This study focused on lexemes that contain related literal and metaphorical senses (i.e., metaphorical polysemies) in Mandarin Chinese, and examined meaning activation patterns of literaldominant lexemes (having dominant literal senses and subordinate metaphorical senses, e.g., 廢物 fèiwù 'waste; a good-for-nothing') and metaphor-dominant lexemes (having dominant metaphorical senses and subordi nate literal senses, e.g., 角度 jiǎodù 'spatial angle; viewpoint') in literally-biased, metaphorically-biased, and control neutral contexts in an online cross-modal lexical priming task. While both senses of literal-dominant lexemes appeared to be accessed regardless of contextual bias, only metaphorical senses of metaphor-dominant lexemes showed signs of activation in compatible contexts. The results are discussed in terms of influences from different degrees of conventionalization of literal and metaphorical senses as well as time course of meaning activation for these two types of lexemes.