Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Languages often reuse words for related meanings, such asbaseball cap and bottle cap, a phenomenon known aspolysemy. In English, it is estimated that 40-80% of allwords are polysemous, yet little is known about children’searly knowledge of polysemous words. In an eye-trackingstudy with monolingual English-learning 2-year-olds(n=40), we found that participants recognized multipleconventional meanings for polysemous nouns. We furtherinvestigated whether toddlers succeeded at this task becausethey were already familiar with multiple, learned meaningsfor words, or whether they simply guessed the correct targetbased on a single or vague meaning. To test this, we alsopresented participants with novel, related meanings for thesame English labels that are not conventional in English,e.g., the meaning “lid” for the label cap. The recognition ofconventional English meanings (baseball cap, bottle cap)was significantly higher than that of the novel extensionmeanings (e.g., a lid) for the same label (cap). These resultsshow that toddlers’ knowledge of polysemy goes beyond asingle or vague representation. At the same time, recognitionof the novel extended meanings was above chance,indicating that toddlers inferred that a related meaning wasthe better of the two options. Word learning theories must befurther developed to account for these complexities inlearning.