Abstract
The aim of this study is to investigate the factors by which college students decide the right meaning of a polyseme while reading. They were asked to read 6 texts including 6 words with multiple meanings and decide the right meaning of each polyseme. The subjects were diveded into two groups(upper-level and lower-level) by the reading and vocabulary tests. By the data collected I examined the differences between both groups about the strategy of the meaning decision of words. As a result of data analysis, as for the guessing strategies of polysemes, there seems to be no great difference between two groups. And few subjects know one meaning of a polyseme are reluctant to abandon it even when, in a particular context, its meaning is different. This result was different from that of the study of Bensoussan and Laufer (1984).
