Lexical ambiguity presents a profound and enduring challenge to the language sciences. Researchers for decades have grappled with the problem of how language users learn, represent and process words with more than one meaning. Our work offers new insight into psychological understanding of lexical ambiguity through a series of simulations that capitalise on recent advances in contextual language models. These models have no grounded understanding of the meanings of words at all; they simply learn to predict words based on the surrounding context provided by other words. Yet, our analyses show that their representations capture fine-grained meaningful distinctions between unambiguous, homonymous, and polysemous words that align with lexicographic classifications and psychological theorising. These findings provide quantitative support for modern psychological conceptualisations of lexical ambiguity and raise new challenges for understanding of the way that contextual information shapes the meanings of words across different timescales.

翻译：词汇歧义对语言科学构成了深远且持久的挑战。数十年来，研究者们一直致力于探究语言使用者如何学习、表征和处理具有多种含义的词汇。本研究通过一系列基于情境语言模型最新进展的模拟实验，为词汇歧义的心理理解提供了新的洞见。这些模型对词汇含义并不具备接地气的理解；它们仅仅通过基于其他词汇提供的上下文语境来学习预测词汇。然而，我们的分析表明，这些模型的表征捕捉到了单义词、同音异义词和多义词之间的精细意义区分，这些区分与词典分类及心理学理论相吻合。这些发现为现代心理学对词汇歧义的概念化提供了定量支持，并对理解上下文信息如何在不同时间尺度上塑造词汇含义提出了新的挑战。