Number of senses effects are modulated by semantic and lexical factors: Evidence from megastudy analyses

Most prior studies of polysemy have focused on main effects of the number of related senses (NOS) associated with a word on processing. However, a small number of studies have reported interactions between NOS and other psycholinguistic covariates which can moderate, or potentially reverse, these main effects. Such interactions have important implications for understanding how different representations are gradually activated over time and whether this occurs in an interactive or stage-like fashion. We tested for interactions between 15 psycholinguistic covariates and NOS in megastudies of visual and auditory lexical decision, naming, and semantic decision. We leveraged dimensionality reduction techniques applied to the covariates to maximize the robustness of our inferences. We found that interactions were prevalent, particularly for covariates associated with lexical and semantic representations. In most megastudies, when another aspect of the word facilitated access (e.g., high frequency), the facilitatory NOS effects were attenuated, but did not reverse to become inhibitory. In semantic categorization, if another aspect of a word facilitated access, an inhibitory effect of NOS became even more inhibitory. These results are largely, but not completely, consistent with the results of past studies. They support a cascaded/interactive account of processing wherein the processing of word senses is fundamentally intertwined with the processing of various covariates at the lexical and semantic (but not sublexical) levels. Our work offered insight into how statistical methods and megastudy data can be further leveraged in this area and extended to other ambiguous words (e.g., homonyms). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).