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For any research program examining how ambiguous words are processed in broader linguistic contexts, a first step is to establish factors relating to the frequency balance or dominance of those words' multiple meanings, as well as the similarity of those meanings to one other. Homonyms—words with divergent meanings—are one ambiguous word type commonly utilized in psycholinguistic research. In contrast, although polysemes—words with multiple related senses—are far more common in English, they have been less frequently used as tools for understanding one-to-many word-to-meaning mappings. The current paper details two norming studies of a relatively large number of ambiguous English words. In the first, offline dominance norming is detailed for 547 homonyms and polysemes via a free association task suitable for words across the ambiguity continuum, with a goal of identifying words with more equibiased meanings. The second norming assesses offline meaning similarity for a partial subset of 318 ambiguous words (including homonyms, unambiguous words, and polysemes divided into regular and irregular types) using a novel, continuous rating method reliant on the linguistic phenomenon of zeugma. In addition, we conduct computational analyses on the human similarity norming data using the BERT pretrained neural language model (Devlin et al., 2018, BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. ArXiv Preprint. arXiv:1810.04805) to evaluate factors that may explain variance beyond that accounted for by dictionary-criteria ambiguity categories. Finally, we make available the summarized item dominance values and similarity ratings in resultant appendices (see supplementary material), as well as individual item and participant norming data, which can be accessed online (https://osf.io/g7fmv/). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Glasgow Norms are a set of normative ratings for 5,553 English words on nine psycholinguistic dimensions: arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, imageability, familiarity, age of acquisition, semantic size, and gender association. The Glasgow Norms are unique in several respects. First, the corpus itself is relatively large, while simultaneously providing norms across a substantial number of lexical dimensions. Second, for any given subset of words, the same participants provided ratings across all nine dimensions (33 participants/word, on average). Third, two novel dimensions—semantic size and gender association—are included. Finally, the corpus contains a set of 379 ambiguous words that are presented either alone (e.g., toast) or with information that selects an alternative sense (e.g., toast (bread), toast (speech)). The relationships between the dimensions of the Glasgow Norms were initially investigated by assessing their correlations. In addition, a principal component analysis revealed four main factors, accounting for 82% of the variance (Visualization, Emotion, Salience, and Exposure). The validity of the Glasgow Norms was established via comparisons of our ratings to 18 different sets of current psycholinguistic norms. The dimension of size was tested with megastudy data, confirming findings from past studies that have explicitly examined this variable. Alternative senses of ambiguous words (i.e., disambiguated forms), when discordant on a given dimension, seemingly led to appropriately distinct ratings. Informal comparisons between the ratings of ambiguous words and of their alternative senses showed different patterns that likely depended on several factors (the number of senses, their relative strengths, and the rating scales themselves). Overall, the Glasgow Norms provide a valuable resource—in particular, for researchers investigating the role of word recognition in language comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]