Abstract
Recently, linguistic literature has examined the difference in ambiguity advantage according to the word's semantic relatedness, whether it is polysemy of homonymy. In the case of Korean nouns, ambiguity is not clearly defined. In experiment 1, we examined the number of dictionay meanings, the number of dictionary senses, and the number of subjective meanings in Korean nouns and conducted lexical decision tasks to see which above-mentioned factors determines the ambiguity advantage. According to regression analysis, the number of subjective meanings was the strong determinant in identifying the ambiguity advantage. Lexical decition task was conducted in experiment in order to clarify the results obtained in experiment 1 by controlling the word frequency and familiarity in the material used in the experiment. The results showed that ambiguous word produced faster reponses compared to unambiguous words which signify the ambiguity advantage.
