Abstract: The subject of the study are homonyms and polysemous words. The problem of homonymy and polysemy always raises many questions, because sometimes there is no clear boundary where ambiguity ends and homonymy begins. Indeed, the boundary between homonymy and polysemy is unstable, permeable, it is constantly violated, and not only by polysemy, when, due to the loss of an "intermediate link", the connection between the individual meanings of a polysemantic word is lost, and it splits into two different homonymous words, but also (which is noted by only a few authors) by Homonymy is when, due to the action of various kinds of reasons, a semantic connection arises between two homonymous words and these words merge into one polysemantic word.The purpose of the article is to distinguish homonyms from polysemous words using an experiment between native speakers, by identifying homonymous words among respondents.
 In this article, special attention is paid to the differentiation of these phenomena by the psycholinguistic method. The author also uses a descriptive method when conducting research. The lexical richness of any language is words that are related to each other, but have different meanings and perform different functions. In colloquial speech, some words are close to each other in meaning, while others are opposite in their semantics. Some words, while not being close in content, can be similar to each other in appearance, shape, spelling and pronunciation. A group of such words in the lexical system of the language is commonly called homonyms.
The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the author for the first time made an attempt to distinguish homonymy and polysemous words in the Mari language using a psycholinguistic method.
The main conclusions of the article are that the conducted associative experiment is one of the most effective ways to distinguish between two lexical phenomena. Of course, the nature of associations is influenced by age, geographical conditions, a person's profession, as well as the level of proficiency in the Mari language, but, nevertheless, the opinions of respondents mostly coincide with lexicographic data.

Abstract: The subject of the study is lexical homonyms in the modern Mari language. The material of the scientific work was the data of the 10-volume dictionary of the Mari language, the Mari-Russian dictionary, the author's card file, compiled by selecting materials from Mari works of art, oral folk art and periodicals. The aim of the work is to distinguish lexical homonyms from other groups of homonyms and to determine their conceptual and semantic relationship. At the first stage, a selection of words that belong to the category of lexical homonyms was carried out. At the next stage of the study, all lexical material was analyzed, this group of homonyms was divided into categories, and a quantitative analysis of lexical homonyms was performed. The research method was the analysis of homonyms based on lexicographic sources. A special contribution of the author to the study of the topic is the appeal to a wide range of works and the multidimensional nature of the study of the issue. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that lexical homonyms in the Mari language are analyzed for the first time.
The result of the study lies in the conclusion that lexical homonyms are the most common group of homonyms in the Mari language, they can be divided into full and incomplete lexical homonyms, as well as substantive, verbal, adjectival, participial, adverbial and several examples with imitative words were distinguished by their relation to parts of speech.
Lexical homonymy occurs among words of the same parts of speech. At the same time, two or more lexical homonyms (full or partial) have an absolute identity of the sound and spelling complex.