@inproceedings{761,
  author = {Sammy Floyd and Adele Goldberg and Casey Lew-Williams},
  title = {Toddlers recognize multiple polysemous meanings and use them to infer additional meanings.},
  abstract = {<p>Up to 80\% of words have multiple, related meanings (polysemy), yet work on early word learning has almost uniformly assumed one-to-one mappings between form and meaning. Using a looking-while-listening procedure, we present the first evidence that toddlers (n=32) can recognize multiple meanings for common nouns, e.g. collar of a dog, shirt collar. In an English-meaning condition, toddlers were tested on their ability to recognize multiple English meanings for polysemous words such as cap(e.g. a baseball cap and a bottle cap). Another condition prompted them with the same English words (e.g., cap), but target referents instead corresponded to the word{\textquoteright}s polysemous extension in an unfamiliar language, (e.g., {\textquotedblleft}lid{\textquotedblright} is a meaning for Spanish{\textquoteright}s {\textquotedblleft}cap{\textquotedblright}, tapa). Toddlers looked to the correct targets above chance in both trial types, but with greater accuracy on English-meaning trials, demonstrating a recognition of familiar word-meaning pairs and an ability to infer potential new meanings (Spanish-meaning trials).</p>},
  year = {2019},
  journal = {CSP},
  pages = {1752},
}