Some psycholinguists, such as Steven Frisson and Martin J. Pickering, believe that the brain has one general ‘underspecified’ meaning for a polysemous word, which activates when it is perceived.

Agustin Vicente, Polysemy and word meaning: an account of lexical meaning for different kinds of content words, Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition ...

In this study, the authors chose a set of ten so-called polysemous words -- words with multiple meanings -- such as bear, jam, just, rock or present.

They chose 50 target words in the corpus that could be identified as polysemous, including 17 words from Greek technical vocabulary and 33 words from the highest-frequency lemmas (forms chosen to ...