Ambiguity Advantage under Meaning Activation

Regarding the presence of ambiguous words in natural language, traditional explanations have focused on the cost of added complexity that would accompany unambiguous languages. In this paper, we suggest that ambiguity may sustain as an inevitable feature of learning languages even without complexity costs. We show that ambiguous words occur more frequently and will therefore more readily be learned with the help of communication context, thus triggering more semantic activations between senses of the ambiguous word. We illustrate this through a game theoretic example.