Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Because most common words have multiple meanings,children are often learning new senses of existing words,rather than entirely new words. Here, we explore whetherchildren can use their knowledge of an existing word sense toconstrain their interpretation of a new word meaning. Acrosstwo studies, we teach 3- and 4-year-olds and adults novelwords for materials, and manipulate whether those words arealso used flexibly, to label objects made from those materials.We find that participants of all ages assign markedly differentinterpretations to the object labels when they have a prior,material meaning: Rather than extending them to otherobjects of similar shapes, they extend them on the basis ofshared material, thus overriding the well-documented shapebias. These findings suggest that language learners can use aword’s prior meaning to learn about the structure of its newmeaning.