Dominance Norms for 274 Korean Homonyms

Abstract

Studying lexical ambiguity is crucial for gaining a deeper understanding of how we process and comprehend language. Lexical ambiguity can be difficult to study experimentally because it often requires that researchers compile all possible meanings of ambiguous words and collect judgments from participants to assess the relative frequency of each meaning (i.e., dominance norms). Although multiple types of dominance norms are available for ambiguous words in English, the investigation of lexical ambiguity in many other languages is severely lacking. Korean is one language for which no previous dominance norms have been published. This is unfortunate, given that the unique writing system of Korean and the influence of Chinese characters on this writing system make Korean an especially interesting test case for examining questions related to ambiguity resolution. Accordingly, the current study provides dominance norms for 274 Korean homonyms through multiple rounds of data collection. Our approach drew heavily from the practices of existing norming methods but with slight modifications to make the task more intuitive for participants and to facilitate easier data addition and updates for researchers. We hope this research will lay the foundation for future studies on lexical ambiguity in Korean, which contributes to the important goal of studying the processing of lexical ambiguity in languages other than English.