Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Word learning relies on the ability to master the sound con-trasts that are phonemic (i.e., signal meaning difference) ina given language. Though the timeline of phoneme develop-ment has been studied extensively over the past few decades,the mechanism of this development is poorly understood. Pre-vious work has shown that human learners rely on referentialinformation to differentiate similar sounds, but largely ignoredthe problem of taxonomic ambiguity at the semantic level (twodifferent objects may be described by one or two words de-pending on how abstract the meaning intended by the speakeris). In this study, we varied the taxonomic distance of pairs ofobjects and tested how adult learners judged the phonemic sta-tus of the sound contrast associated with each of these pairs.We found that judgments were sensitive to gradients in thetaxonomic structure, suggesting that learners use probabilisticinformation at the semantic level to optimize the accuracy oftheir judgements at the phonological level. The findings pro-vide evidence for an interaction between phonological learningand meaning generalization, raising important questions abouthow these two important processes of language acquisition arerelated.