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Description: This study investigates the nature of semantically complex words like book, as compared to both polysemous and monosemous words. These words are characterized by a multiplicity of interpretations (as physical object and informational content in the case of book) that are not mutually exclusive. Unlike standard ambiguous words, words with complex semantic types allow for co-predication and unified reference. Although they have received much attention in the linguistic literature, their exact status as ambiguous forms remains uncertain. Some authors consider complex nouns as a special case of polysemy, because these words have several senses (Nunberg 1995, Pustejovsky 1995, Ortega-Andres and Vicente 2019, a.o), while others consider them as a special case of monosemy, because these senses are fundamentally compatible (Cruse 2004, Dölling 2020, a.o). The purpose of the study is to investigate empirically the nature of complex types, based on semantic judgements about their sameness or difference of meaning, and on observations about the way they are processed and represented in the mental lexicon. The study includes two experiments contrasting complex-type words with polysemous (metonymic) words on the one hand, and monosemous words on the other hand. In the first experiment, we question native speakers’ intuitions and metalinguistic judgements about the three classes of words. The second experiment is based on a sensicality task to determine whether speakers’ judgements are consistent with lexical representations, and more generally whether the lexical processing and representation of complex-type words differ from those of ambiguous and unambiguous words. This preregistration describes the study design, hypotheses, methods, and statistical analysis planned for the first experiment.