Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When a novel word refers to something in the world, how do learners decide whether that word have a more specific meaning (e.g., dog) or more general meaning (e.g., animal)? Here we focus on the role of semantic contrast between referential alternatives. We do this in the context of learning novel words cross-situationally, asking when learners adopt more specific meanings (resulting in homophonic words: e.g., ‘fami' means both dog and butterfly) or adopt a single superordinate meaning (e.g., ‘fami' means animal). We hypothesize that learners will be more likely to establish homophonous meanings when contrasting referents are from a neighboring category of the target, and more likely to establish a superordinate meaning when contrasting referents are from more distant categories. We also expect homophone learning to be more difficult because of its additional demands on learning and memory. Our predictions were borne out in a series of experiments and modeling.