LICENSE

Abstract

Polysemy is a phenomenon in which individual words have multiple, related meanings, such as drinking glasses and eyeglasses (which, in this case, relate through their common material). Polysemous words are ubiquitous in many languages and comprise an estimated 40- 80% of the English language. To examine how young language learners acquire polysemous words, the present study used an eyetracking experiment with monolingual English-speaking 2- year-olds (n=40). In the study, the toddler was shown a screen with two images and prompted to find the target image (e.g. “look, can you find the glasses?”). Our findings showed that toddlers could recognize two English meanings (e.g. drinking glasses and eyeglasses) as well as infer a novel, third meaning that is present as a polysemous meaning in another language, but not English (e.g., goggles, which share a label with eyeglasses in some dialects of Spanish: gafas). These findings suggest that children can successfully track multiple, polysemous meanings, and even possess the ability to infer new extensions that they have never encountered before. This information is crucial for understanding the principles that guide word acquisition, which have previously assumed that additional meanings of a word will interfere with previous meanings.