When learning English, students often grapple with the meanings of ambiguous words. However, the acquisition of polysemous words by EFL learners remains underrepresented in the research literature. To address this imbalance, the present study intends to investigate the development of the mental representations of polysemous words in Chinese EFL learners. We first measured the students’ lexical knowledge of polysemous words via word association, whereby they were divided into two groups: the high proficiency group and the low proficiency group. Then a questionnaire was administered to the students to investigate their English metaphoric competence and vocabulary learning strategies. The results indicated that the students’ polysemy learning strategies and metaphoric competence could have modulated the representational development of polysemous words in light of the meaning extension mechanisms.
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