The Perception and Acquisition of Chinese Polysemy

Polysemous lexical items have multiple senses associated with a single form, and these senses are interrelated. Polysemy is a universal and omnipresent phenomenon, providing a robust tool to convey creatively our ideas and thoughts. As a result, polysemy presents challenges for second language (L2) learners. Existing studies on the issue of polysemy in language acquisition often rely on researchers’ subjective understandings of the network of meanings around a lexical item or focus on English ex