Mancuso, A. & Laudanna, A.
Department of Communication Sciences. University of Salerno. Salerno, Italy.
The present study investigates the role played by frequency dominance and grammatical class information in lexical processing of homonyms in Italian. By using a naming task, we evaluated different degrees of semantic priming on homonyms, depending on whether they were preceded by primes biasing toward dominant vs. subordinate meaning. We selected 90 homonymic words: 18 had a higher frequency as nouns (e.g., abito, dress/I live); 18 had a higher frequency as verbs (e.g., accetta, he/she accepts/hatchet); 18 had two balanced nominal meanings, (e.g., credenza, cupboard/belief); 18 had two unbalanced nominal meanings (e.g., campione; champion/sample); 18 had two balanced nominal/verbal meanings (e.g., boccia, bowl/he-she rejects). The critical stimuli were preceded by semantically related vs. unrelated primes. The results showed a significant priming effect when the prime was biased toward the dominant meaning of unbalanced words or toward one of the two meanings of balanced words, while no priming effect was found when the subordinate meaning was activated. The results are interpreted as evidence that both the dominance relationship between multiple meanings and the grammatical class ambiguity affect processing of homonymic words.