Bottle Cap or Baseball Cap: The Implications of Polysemy on Word Learning Theory

Abstract

The majority of the most common and popular word learning theories, such as propose-butverify and cross-situational word learning, focus on mapping one word onto one meaning. Additionally, these theories often propose that when a possible word mapping is disproved, people forget their original mapping entirely and make a new guess at the meaning of the word. However, language is much more complicated, and contains many words with multiple meanings. These multiple-meaning words cannot be accounted for in either propose-but-verify or cross-situational word learning, which both end with only one meaning per mapping. In fact, there are no current word learning theories that can account for multiple-meaning words. One possible way to investigate how children learn and understand words with multiple meanings is to compare how they process polysemy, words with multiple related but different meanings, and homonyms, words with multiple unrelated and different meanings. As has been suggested by some studies, including Brocher et al. (2017), polysemous words have overlapping representations, where people use the shared features of the meanings to more quickly process and select the correct meaning. These shared features could also be used to more easily learn polysemous words, giving insight into how children learn words with multiple meanings in the first place. In the first experiment of this study, we attempted to teach children novel polysemes and homonyms. We found that the participants are able to learn the words and accept the multiple meanings, and also show a polysemy advantage, indicating that they are learning, storing, and processing polysemes differently than homonyms. In the second experiment of this study, we looked at children’s understanding and processing of balanced frequency multiplemeaning words in English. We again found that children had a polysemy advantage in switching between meanings of the words, which indicates that they are using the shared features, or overlapping representations, of the polysemes. In addition, this polysemy advantage was attenuated by vocabulary knowledge, suggesting that the polysemy advantage is a tactic children are using before their vocabulary skill is strong enough to do the same task. The study concludes that children have a polysemy advantage when learning and processing multiple-meaning words, indicating that they are using the shared features to understand these words. While these experiments do not fully illuminate how children learn and process multiple-meaning words, future studies will further uncover pieces of the process until a new, and more complete, word learning theory can be created.