(This is related to but distinct from the merely polysemous words that have several related meanings), Because of the conflation of several unrelated meanings into the same orthographic form, homographs implicitly contain more semantic content in a single word.
one would expect the meaning of homographs to mature more slowly than would be predicted by frequency alone: all things being equal, a learner has to learn the meanings for all of the senses of a homograph word before the word can be considered fully known.