Colloquium

The first and main part of my talk will interrogate one classic solution: the idea that children are guided by certain assumptions about the meanings of words that greatly simplify the learning problem—in particular, the assumption that a new word will have only a single meaning, corresponding to a single taxonomic category. I will argue that this theory does not make sense of why most common words in natural language are polysemous (i.e., they express multiple distinct but related meanings), because it predicts that children should struggle to learn these words. Instead, I will present evidence suggesting that, rather than impeding learning, polysemy may help children overcome some of the challenges inherent to learning new words, by allowing children to use their knowledge of one meaning of a word to make inferences about other, related meanings for that word. These findings suggest that children may make different assumptions about word meanings than previously-thought, expecting words to be used flexibly, across a family of related meanings.

Finally, in the last part of my talk, I will re-visit another long-standing idea about how children learn words: the notion that, in direct conversations with children, caregivers provide labels that follow their children’s focus of attention, as well as other important clues to the meanings of new words (e.g., eye gaze, gestures). An extension of this idea is that children may be able to learn little from speech that they overhear, which often lacks these features and requires attending to interactions among others. Challenging this prediction, I will present evidence of early word knowledge—including knowledge that could only have been learned from overhearing—among infants from a Mayan community in Southern Mexico who are rarely spoken to directly. These results open the possibility that children from different communities may deploy different strategies toward learning language, with their respective strategies adapted to the specific contexts in which they are developing. Taken together, these two lines of work show how theories of language learning can be re-imagined by broadening the scope of research to capture the complexity of the knowledge that children have to acquire, and the diversity of contexts in which they develop this knowledge.