Most English word forms convey multiple meanings, that is, they are semantically ambiguous. A relatively small proportion of these ambiguous forms are homonyms that convey distinct meanings (e.g., bank may refer to a financial institution or the land bordering a river), while the majority are polysemes that convey interrelated senses (mouth may refer to the mouth of a person or a river). Empirical investigations have demonstrated an advantage for polysemous word forms across various lexical processing tasks, suggesting differences in the way they are organized in semantic memory. However, polysemous forms also tend to be more frequent, comprise fewer phonemes and syllables, and occur in more dense neighborhoods involving more similar sounding words. The nature and extent of these systematic polysemy-form mappings and their influence on processing have yet to be fully investigated. The present study reports an analysis of a corpus of English monomorphemic words (N = 4,466), confirming that phonological features predict a significant proportion of variance (16.8%) in the number of senses conveyed by a word. A series of experiments using relative weight analyses of megastudy data sets of word recognition and production tasks demonstrates that these systematic polysemy-form mappings have a relatively important influence on lexical processing compared to other lexical and semantic variables. These findings suggest that polysemous word forms might be structured systematically to minimize cognitive costs and maintain a compact or kernel lexicon. Implications for current accounts of lexical ambiguity based solely on semantic similarity are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

大多数英文单词形式传达多种含义，即它们在语义上是模棱两可的。这些模棱两可的形式中，相对较小的一部分是同音异义词（例如，“bank”可能指的是金融机构或河边的土地），而大部分则是多义词，它们表达的是相互关联的意义（“mouth”可以指人的嘴或河流的河口）。实证研究已经证明，在各种词汇处理任务中，多义词形式具有优势，这表明它们在语义记忆中的组织方式不同。然而，多义词通常更为频繁，包含更少的音素和音节，并且出现在涉及更多发音相似单词的密集邻域中。这些系统化的多义性-形式映射及其对处理的影响尚未得到充分研究。

本研究报告了一项分析英文单形态词（N = 4,466）语料库的研究，确认了语音特征预测了一个单词所传达意义数量的重要比例（16.8%）。一系列使用大规模数据集进行相对权重分析的词汇识别和生成任务实验表明，这些系统化的多义性-形式映射对词汇处理的影响相较于其他词汇和语义变量更为重要。这些发现表明，多义词可能被系统化地组织以最小化认知成本，并维持一个精简或核心的词汇库。讨论了基于单纯语义相似性的当前词汇模棱两可解释方法的含义。（PsycInfo数据库记录 © 2025 APA，版权所有）