Individual differences in word senses

Abstract Individual differences and polysemy have rich literatures in cognitive linguistics, but little is said about the prospect of individual polysemy. This article reports an investigation that sought to establish whether people vary senses a polysemous word they find meaningful, develop novel methodology study The combined established tools: sentence-sorting tasks, rarely used statistical model inter-participant agreement, network visualisation. Two hundred five English-speaking participants completed one twelve tasks on two occasions, separated by delay months. Participants varied how similarly sorted sentences as compared other participants, mean agreement across all 24 did not meet threshold acceptable agreement. Between test phases, significant trivial degree. Networks generated for each dataset degree which captured participants’ responses. variation correlated with data collectively suggest may be subject differences, case linguistic phenomena. proved replicable has promise useful tool studying