Studies of polysemy are few in number and are contradictory. Some have found differences between polysemy and homonymy (L. Frazier & K. Rayner, 1990), and others have found similarities (D. K. Klein & G. Murphy, 2001). The authors investigated this issue using the methods of D. K. Klein and G. Murphy (2001), in whose study participants judged whether ambiguous words embedded in word pairs (e.g., tasty chicken) made sense as a function of a cooperating, conflicting, or neutral context. The ambiguous words were independently rated as having low, moderate, or highly overlapping senses to approximate a continuum from homonymy to metonymic polysemy. The effects of meaning dominance were examined. Words with highly overlapping meanings (e.g., metonymy) showed reduced effects of context and dominance compared with words with moderately or low overlapping meanings (e.g., metaphorical polysemy and homonymy). These results suggest that the comprehension of ambiguous words is mediated by the semantic overlap of alternative senses/meanings.

RESUMEN: La construcción de la democracia en el Perú es una vieja tarea que se realiza, aunque imperceptiblemente, lenta y tercamente tanto en la cultura política de los nuevos ciudadanos como en la organización política de la sociedad. El presente artículo es un ensayo sobre la aventura democrática en el primer lustro del siglo XXI yendo a las últimas décadas del siglo XX en el Perú, en las que la institucionalidad democrática adquiere nueva legitimidad, para entender las dificultades que los actores políticos encuentran y que se deben tomar en cuenta para hablar de la calidad de la democracia, en la línea que el artículo de Levine y Molina (2007) nos propone.ABSTRACT: The construction of democracy in Peru is a long standing challenge that has advanced slowly and stubbornly, if imperceptibly at time, in both the political culture of the citizens and the political organization of society. This article analyzes the «democratic adventure» in Peru in the first years of the 21st century in the context of the last two decades of the 20th, when democratic institutionalization achieved a new level of legitimacy, to identify the challenges to democracy that political actors have confronted. These elements will help analyze the quality of democracy along the lines proposed in the work of Levine and Molina (2007).

RESUMEN Los estudiantes de medicina dedican gran parte del tiempo a estudiar las materias necesarias