The polysemy of the words that children learn over time
This addresses how children learn language, with incremental insights into vocabulary acquisition biases.
The study investigated whether children have a learning bias for low-polysemy words in vocabulary acquisition, finding that mean polysemy in children's speech increases over time in two phases (fast growth until 31 months, then slower), unlike in adults interacting with children, suggesting an early preference for non-polysemous words.
Here we study polysemy as a potential learning bias in vocabulary learning in children. 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 part-of-speech categories. Our results show that mean polysemy in children increases over time in two phases, i.e. a fast growth till the 31st month followed by a slower tendency towards adult speech. In contrast, this evolution is not found in adults interacting with children. This suggests that children have a preference for non-polysemous words in their early stages of vocabulary acquisition. Interestingly, the evolutionary pattern described above weakens when controlling for syntactic category (noun, verb, adjective or adverb) but it does not disappear completely, suggesting that it could result from acombination of a standalone bias for low polysemy and a preference for nouns.