Polysemy and the Taxonomic Constraint: Children's Representation of Words that Label Multiple Kinds
Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: How do children resolve the problem of indeterminacy when learning a new word? By one account, children adopt a taxonomic assumption and expect the word to denote only members of a particular taxonomic category. According to one version of this constraint, young children should represent polysemous words that label multiple kinds—e.g., chicken, which labels an animal and its meat—as separate and unrelated words that each encode a single kind. Our studies provide evidence against this account: we show that four- and five-year-old children spontaneously expect that a word that has labeled one meaning of a familiar polysemous word will also label its other, taxonomically-different meaning. Further, we show that children’s taxonomic flexibility is importantly constrained—children do not expect a word to label thematically-related meanings (e.g., chicken and egg), or the unrelated meanings of homophones (e.g., bat[animal] and bat[baseball]). We argue that although children are initially guided by the taxonomic constraint when pairing word forms with meanings, they nonetheless relate the taxonomically-different meanings of polysemous words within lexical structure. Thus, for even young children, a single word can label multiple kinds.
Authors: Mahesh Srinivasan, Jesse Snedeker
Institutions: University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: National Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W2088446169