Concentric: Studies in Linguistics 42.1 (May 2016): 1-30 DOI: 10.6241/concentric.ling.42.1.01 Representation of Polysemy in Mandarin Verbs: Chī, Dǎ, and Xǐ * Huichen S. Hsiao, Yi-Chun Chen & Ying-Chen Wu National Taiwan Normal University This paper reports the findings from a semantic judgment priming task aimed at examining how senses of three semantically complex Mandarin verbs chī ‘eat’, dǎ ‘hit’, and xǐ ‘wash’ are stored in the mental lexicon. In the experiment, the prime stimuli belonged to the basic senses of the three critical polysemous verbs. Three target conditions, that is, verb phrases with the same basic senses (e.g. chī niúpái ‘to eat steak’), closely related senses (e.g. chī wěiyá ‘to attend a year-end party’), and distantly related senses (e.g. chī lǎoběn ‘to live on one’s own fat’), were prepared to test whether processing patterns varied for different types of extended senses within a polysemous verb. The results indicate linearly decreasing priming effects for senses moving from the core senses, through closely related senses, to distantly related senses. These effects conflict with the separate-entry view and provide evidence for a shared core representa- tion among polysemous senses. Key words: lexical ambiguity, polysemy, semantic priming, sense relatedness 1. Introduction How words are acquired, stored, and recollected in the mind remains a topic of extensive research. Although physical dictionaries and the mental lexicon may be assumed to be accessed dissimilarly, their actual physical differences and the implications of such differences continue to arouse scholars’ interest. Although previous studies on the mental lexicon have addressed the initiation time of word recognition (Marslen-Wilson 1975), the effect of frequency on word recognition (Savin 1963, Forster & Chambers 1973, Whaley 1978), and the processing of morphological information in English (Taft & Forster 1975, Marslen-Wilson et al. 1994) and compound words in Mandarin (Zhou & Marslen-Wilson 1994, 1995), others have highlighted the topic of lexical ambiguity. Although much effort has been devoted to discussing the distinction between polysemy and homonymy in the mental lexicon, questions remain as to how polysemous words with various extensions are represented in the mind. Thus, the present study investigated one type of ambiguity, namely polysemy, probing the representation of various senses of a semantically complex polysemous word. * Acknowledgements: we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments which helped us improving various aspects upon earlier drafts of this paper. Our special thanks go to all participants who took part in this experiment. This study was funded as part of two MOST-funded research projects (MOST 102-2410-H-003-018-MY2 & NSC 100-2410-H-003-085), and was partially subsidized by the National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU), Taiwan, R.O.C. Any remaining errors are solely our own responsibility. 1