What is it about?
Words of low polysemy could be preferred as they reduce the disambiguation effort for the listener. However, such preference could be a side-effect of another bias: the preference of children for nouns in combination with the lower polysemy of nouns with respect to other syntactic categories, such as verbs.
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Why is it important?
We have shown that the mean polysemy of words increases over time for children markedly, but this effect is not observed in adults interacting with them and thus cannot be attributed to Child Directed Speech.
Perspectives
It has been exciting all the time spent writing this article. From the first experiments that showed contradictory explanations, to the gathering of conclusions regarding the great amount of biases in the acquisition of language.
Neus Català
Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The polysemy of the words that children learn over time, Interaction Studies Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems, December 2018, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/is.16036.cas.
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