Children use polysemy to structure new word meanings

Journal of Experimental Psychology. General
Mahesh SrinivasanHugh Rabagliati

Abstract

It is well-known that children rapidly learn words, following a range of heuristics. What is less well appreciated is that-because most words are polysemous and have multiple meanings (e.g., "glass" can label a material and drinking vessel)-children will often be learning a new meaning for a known word, rather than an entirely new word. Across 4 experiments we show that children flexibly adapt a well-known heuristic-the shape bias-when learning polysemous words. Consistent with previous studies, we find that children and adults preferentially extend a new object label to other objects of the same shape. But we also find that when a new word for an object ("a gup") has previously been used to label the material composing that object ("some gup"), children and adults override the shape bias, and are more likely to extend the object label by material (Experiments 1 and 3). Further, we find that, just as an older meaning of a polysemous word constrains interpretations of a new word meaning, encountering a new word meaning leads learners to update their interpretations of an older meaning (Experiment 2). Finally, we find that these effects only arise when learners can perceive that a word's meanings are related, not when they are ar...Continue Reading

Citations

Sep 19, 2020·Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders·Sammy FloydAdele E Goldberg
Dec 29, 2020·Child Development·Ariel StarrMahesh Srinivasan
Jun 6, 2021·Cognition·Colin JacobsJulian Jara-Ettinger

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