Familiar Forms, Additional Meanings: Learning Polysemous Vocabulary in Adult Second-Language English

Abstract

Recognizing an English word does not establish knowledge of all the meanings that the word conventionally expresses. This distinction is especially important for adult learners who encounter familiar forms in occupational, academic, and everyday settings where a previously learned interpretation no longer fits. In a test involving 87 advanced Turkish learners, 81 English nouns, and 162 tested meanings, core uses were better known than extended uses, and metonymical extensions were better known than metaphorical extensions. A Chinese--English production study involving 90 learners further showed that the familiarity of the first-language translation affected performance. Experiments with adult native-language readers found that new meanings connected to a word's established meaning were easier to learn than unrelated assignments, while reading research demonstrated benefits when a fixed number of encounters was distributed across different texts. These results identify distinct influences on adult vocabulary learning, but they do not measure the same learning outcome. This article explains how meaning relations, translation correspondence, exposure, and feedback affect the acquisition of additional meanings of familiar second-language words. The English nouns branch and seal are examined through specific classroom sentences, usage boundaries, and assessment tasks. The central distinction is between interpreting a meaning during one encounter, being able to use it in unfamiliar contexts, and becoming faster at selecting a meaning already known. These distinctions support precise teaching decisions and more informative investigations of lexical development.