| 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). |
