The Interplay of Synonymy and Polysemy

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3.3.2 Respondents 
The respondents were recruited in Juticalpa, Honduras. It is a town located in the 
center of the country, northeast of the capital Tegucigalpa, and is the capital of Olancho, the 
largest department of the country. A total of 37 questionnaires were filled out, but 7 were 
eliminated from the final study. Four were eliminated because the individuals responded 
incorrectly to the control questions. The other three were eliminated for leaving test questions 
unanswered. The discussions of the test will only refer to the 30 remaining questionnaires.
Most of the respondents (14) were raised in this same city, 10 were originally from 
other cities in the same state (Olancho), and 6 were raised in other parts of the country. The 
subjects varied in age and education level. The majority were 20-39, and had either a high 
school or a college degree. There were 15 female and 15 male respondents. A full breakdown 
of respondents is given in Appendix B.
The questionnaire was pre-piloted with four colleagues. Then the questionnaire was 
piloted with 20 individuals. The pilots helped correct ambiguous sentences, odd wording and 
other issues such as the formatting. The entire process from pre-pilot to the administration of 
the questionnaire spanned from August 2011 to January 2012.
The CdE contains text mostly from the larger Spanish speaking countries. Only four 
data points in the 400-sentece sample (one for each verb) originated in Honduras, all from the 
newspaper La Prensa. A possibility exists that there are dialectal traits in the experimental 
data. Unfortunately, exploring dialectal variation (along with variation due to gender, age, 
education level, register, etc.) is beyond the scope of this project. Some anecdotal data is 
provided in order to give at least a basic picture of the possible factors.
3.3.3 Statistical Measures 
 
Once the questionnaires were finished, all data was entered into a Microsoft Excel 
spreadsheet. The responses were summed up for each of the four sentence types. That is, all 
the responses for the seven sentences with upward motion were added together. The same 
was done for the other three sentence types. This resulted in a four by four table showing the 
occurrence of each verb with each sentence type. The results are shown in table 6. 

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