Making room for new words
Abstract
When words are borrowed into a language, their meanings often narrow. For example, 'salsa' can mean any sauce in Spanish but refers only to tomato-pepper sauces in English. What principles of individuals' learning shape this collective semantic narrowing? We propose that semantic narrowing reflects an accumulation of pragmatic inferences about word meaning. When listeners encounter a novel word for an already-nameable concept, they infer that it has a more specific and atypical meaning than existing terms. Across four experiments, we tested these inferences among adults and preschoolers. Participants saw arrays of familiar category exemplars (e.g., leaves of varying subtypes) and were prompted with familiar words ("leaves") or novel words ("nefts"). Both adults and children selected more specific subtypes and more atypical exemplars when prompted with novel words. Learners carve out distinctive meanings for new words, a pragmatic inference that may shape meaning from early childhood to long-range language change.