The polysemy of the words that children learn over time

TL;DR

This study investigates how children's vocabulary develops in terms of polysemy, revealing an early preference for less polysemous words that diminishes over time, influenced by syntactic category biases.

Contribution

It uncovers the developmental trajectory of polysemy in children's vocabulary and disentangles the effects of syntactic category and polysemy bias.

Findings

Children's mean polysemy increases in two phases over time.

Early vocabulary shows a bias for low-polysemy words, especially nouns.

The pattern weakens when controlling for syntactic category.

Abstract

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.