Words are often associated with more than a single meaning. Surprisingly, despite the widespread prevalence of ambiguity in language, word learning is typically studied within developmental psychology as a problem in which only a single meaning needs to be learned for each new word. This simplification has led to a set of theories that can explain how children learn a single, concrete meaning for a word, like “dog”, but fail to illustrate how children develop their vocabulary more generally. The proposed research brings together two investigators with complementary expertise to provide new experimental and computational evidence regarding how ambiguous words are learned.
UC PI:
Mahesh Srinivasan
Psychology, UC Berkeley
France PI:
Isabelle Dautriche
Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive (UMR7290), CNRS/Aix-Marseille University