Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Up to 80% of words have multiple, related meanings (polysemy), yet work on early word learning has almost uniformlyassumed one-to-one mappings between form and meaning. Using a looking-while-listening procedure, we present thefirst evidence that toddlers (n=40) can recognize multiple meanings for common nouns, e.g., dog collar, shirt collar. In anEnglish-meaning condition, toddlers were tested on their ability to recognize multiple English meanings for polysemouswords such as cap (e.g., a baseball cap and a bottle cap). Another condition prompted toddlers with the same Englishwords (e.g., cap), but target referents instead corresponded to the words polysemous extension in an unfamiliar language,(e.g., lid is a meaning for Spanishs cap, tapa). Toddlers looked to the correct targets above chance on both trial types,but with greater accuracy on English-meaning trials, demonstrating a recognition of familiar word-meaning pairs and anability to infer potential new meanings.