Judging a book by its cover and its contents: The representation of polysemous and homophonous meanings in four-year-old children

被引:33
作者
Srinivasan, Mahesh [1 ]
Snedeker, Jesse [2 ]
机构
[1] Univ Calif San Diego, Dept Psychol, San Diego, CA 92103 USA
[2] Harvard Univ, Dept Psychol, Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
基金
美国国家科学基金会;
关键词
Lexical representation; Semantic development; Lexical semantics; Polysemy; Homophony; Lexical ambiguity; WORD; AMBIGUITY; SENSES; ACCESS;
D O I
10.1016/j.cogpsych.2011.03.002
中图分类号
B84 [心理学];
学科分类号
04 ; 0402 ;
摘要
Unlike homophonous meanings, which are semantically unrelated (e.g., the use of bat to refer to a baseball bat and a flying rodent), polysemous meanings are systematically related to one another (e.g., the use of book, CD, and video to refer to physical objects, as in 'the leather book', or to the intellectual content they contain, as in 'the profound book'). But do perceived relations among polysemous meanings reflect the presence of generative lexical or conceptual structures that permit the meanings of these words to shift? If so, these structures may also support children's early representations of polysemous meanings. In four studies, we demonstrate (1) that four-year-old children can understand both the concrete and abstract meanings of words like book, (2) that when taught a novel label for one of these meanings, children can readily understand an extension of that label to the other meaning, and (3) that extension does not occur between two homophonous meanings, which share a common phonological form but are otherwise unrelated. We conclude that the polysemous meanings of words like book rely on a common representational base early in development, and suggest that this may be the result of foundational, generative properties of the lexicon or conceptual system. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
引用
收藏
页码:245 / 272
页数:28
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