About bound and scary books: The processing of book polysemies

•Two experiments investigated the processing of regular polysemes such as book.•In a sensicality task, sense-switching was costly, but no effect of sense frequency.•In a reading task, switching from subordinate to dominant sense most costly.•No (early) effects for polysemes in neutral or sense-repeating sentences.•Results compatible with underspecification view but not sense-enumeration model.

There are competing views on the on-line processing of polysemous words such as book, which have distinct but semantically related senses (as in bound book vs. scary book). According to a Sense-Enumeration Lexicon (SEL) view, different senses are represented separately, just as the different meanings of a homonym (e.g. bank). According to an underspecification view, initial processing does not distinguish between the different senses. According to a Relevance Theory (RT)-inspired view, the context will immediately guide interpretation to a specific sense. In Experiment 1, participants indicated whether an adjective–noun construction made sense or not. Switching from one sense to another was costly, but there was no effect of sense frequency (contra SEL). In Experiment 2, eye movements were recorded when participants read sentences in which a polyseme was disambiguated to a specific sense following a neutral context, a sense was repeated, or a sense was switched. The results showed no effect of sense dominance in the neutral condition, no advantage when a sense was repeated, and a cost when switched, especially when switching from a concrete to an abstract interpretation. These data cannot be fitted in an SEL or RT-inspired account, questioning the validity of both as a processing account.