One word or two? An experimental approach to homonymy in Spanish

This paper presents new data on the interpretation and processing of homonymy in Spanish. The objectives are to define the theoretical concept of homonymy and to offer experimental data on how these units are processed. Firstly, the definition of homonymy is reviewed, from a diachronic and synchronic point of view. Then a brief state of the art on the processing of homonymous words, considering different psycholinguistic studies that have found an ambiguity effect on word processing. Due to the fact that the material of English experiments may be problematic regarding the concept of homonymy that they use, and that the results in Spanish are not consistent, in this paper two experimental studies are presented. They aim to answer two research questions: how homonymy is interpreted in Spanish and how it is processed. All these data have implications for the models of mental representation.