For many models oflexical ambiguity resolution, relative frequency of the different meanings of homographs (words with more than one meaning) is crucial. Although several homograph association norms have been published in the past, none has involved a large number of subjects responding to a large number of homographs, and most homograph norming studies are now at least a decade old. In Experiment 1, associations to 566 homographs were collected from an average of 192 subjects per homograph. Frequency of occurrence for the three most common meanings is reported, along with the corresponding associates, and a measure of the overall ambiguity of each homograph. Homographs whose meanings differed in part of speech were more ambiguous overall than homographs whose different meanings belonged to a single grammatical class. Homographs whose pronunciation depended on meaning (heterophones) were no more ambiguous than nonheterophones, and word frequency was unrelated to overall ambiguity. Estimates of homograph balance across different norming studies were compared, and homographs with two meanings of approximately equal relative meaning frequency (balanced homographs) and homographs with one clearly dominant meaning (polarized homographs) were identified. In Experiment 2, reliability of meaning categorizations was measured for a subset of the homographs in the first experiment. Meaning categorizations were shown to be highly reliable across raters.Homographs are words that have more than one meaning but share the same orthography. They most often also share phonology (e.g., a dog's bark vs. a tree's bark; a fireplace poker vs. a poker game), but a few English homographs have distinct phonologies for their different meanings. For these heterophonic homographs, pronunciation depends on meaning; examples are "bass" (fish vs. guitar) and "wind" (gale vs. to coil). Contrary to intuition, homographs are not an obscure class of linguistic items. Rather, homographs could be considered important topics of study solely because of their abundance in English. Britton (1978) found that 44 % of a random sample of English words had more than one meaning, and that 85 % of a sample of high-frequency English words had more than one meaning. Several authors have argued that meaning indeterminacy in language and the environment in general is widespread and is one of the pervasive problems of human information processing (e.g

Memory for procedural discourse was examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1, memory was assessed using recall; in Experiment 2, a recognition test was used. In both experiments, the memorability of three types of action statements were compared: a transitive verb form, in which the action was described by a main clause; a verbal adjective form, in which the action was indicated by an adjective derived from a verb; and an implicit action form, in which the action was only implied. Information associated with transitive verbs and verbal adjectives was more likely to be recalled than information associated with implicit actions. Although a manipulation of prior knowledge affected overall recall performance, it did not interact with sentence form. In addition, recognition accuracy was affected by neither sentence form nor prior knowledge. To account for these results, it was proposed that transitive verbs and verbal adjectives generate a semantic representation that includes features of the action, whereas implicit actions do not. This difference in semantic representation leads to structural differences in a mental plan for the task. The obtained effects on recall reflect these differences in plan structure.Resume Deux experiences ont porte sur la memoire du discours procedural. Nous avons evalue la me'moire a l'aide d'une epreuve de rappel (experience 1) et d'une epreuve de reconnaissance (experience 2). Dans les deux experiences, nous avons compare la meinorabilite de trois genres destructions: un enonce reposant sur un verbe transitif, dans lequel une proposition principale decrit l'action; un enonce axe sur un adjectif verbal, ou 1'action est indiquee par un adjectif issu d'un verbe, et un enonce indiquant implicitement une action. L'information transmise par les verbes transitifs et par les adjectifs verbaux etait plus susceptible d'etre retenue que l'information reliee aux actions implicites. Bien que la manipulation des connaissances anterieures ait influe sur la performance globale de rappel, il n'y a pas eu d'interaction entre cette manipulation et les 6nonces. De plus, ni les enonces ni les connaissances anterieures n'ont eu d'effets sur Fexactitude de la reconnaissance. Pour rendre compte des resultats, nous crayons que les verbes transitifs et les adjectifs verbaux produisent une representation scmantique