ABSTRACT
To understand an isolated word, its phonological or orthographic properties must be used to locate some internal representation from which the word's meanings and usages can be retrieved. Although some words have only one sense, a great many words have more than one distinct meaning or can serve more than one function in a sentence. For example, in the sentence, ''The artist began to draw a picture," the word "draw" means "to sketch" rather than "to pull'' or ''a tie.'' The extent of lexical ambiguity in natural language is often underestimated, but the difficulty of writing machine translation programs (Kelly & Stone, 1975; Kuno & Oettinger, 1963; Yngve, 1964) attests to the problem of ambiguity resolution in recovering meaning from a string of orthographic or phonological symbols.
