Soft Constraints on Mapping Form to Meaning in Lexical Acquisition

Research in diachronic Linguistics has shown that homonyms are often avoided in language. This study proposes that this trend is a result of general cognitive principles at work during language acquisition. In support of this proposition, the first two experiments present findings demonstrating that children disprefer learning a different, unrelated meaning for a known word when that word is used in a linguistic context that fails to bias strongly for a new meaning. Children, however, appear to have much less difficulty in learning homonyms when the syntactic context clearly indicates that a new meaning is required. A third experiment investigates the implications of the proposal for polysemy. This final experiment shows that children are likely to interpret an accoustically ambiguous stimulus as a known word only if the known word is related to the context in which they hear the word. Otherwise, children prefer a novel word over an unrelated known word (i.e., a homonym).

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Linguistics

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Casenhiser, Devin Mark

Contributors dc:contributor

• Goldberg, Adele E.

• Psychology, Developmental

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3130890

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/82624