抄録
Usually, words have more than one meaning, causing difficulty in acquiring all meanings of ambiguous words. Polysemous words, however, have semantically related or overlapping senses (hereafter, semantic overlap), which may help to infer and retain an appropriate meaning of these words. This study examines the effects of semantic overlap on inferring and retaining subordinate meanings of polysemous words for Japanese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). A total of 49 Japanese undergraduates attempted to infer and learn the subordinate meanings of 18 target words (nine high and nine low-overlap words) in the lexical inference and recall tasks. The results showed that the degree of semantic overlap affects the inference and retention of subordinate meanings of polysemous words.
