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Goldberg, Adele E. Casenhiser, Devin Mark 2015-09-25T20:50:43Z 2015-09-25T20:50:43Z 10000-01-01 2004 2004 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). Made available in DSpace on 2015-09-25T20:50:43Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license.txt: 4848 bytes, checksum: 96035ab3f5e1c23cc7138a224ce498bd (MD5) 3130890.pdf: 2210573 bytes, checksum: 5951a336d2b126bd0a0259cb432d8859 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2004 Embargo set by: Seth Robbins for item 83905 Lift date: Forever Reason: Restricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETDs Restricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETDs U of I Only 96 p. Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/2142/82624 (MiAaPQ)AAI3130890 eng Psychology, Developmental Soft Constraints on Mapping Form to Meaning in Lexical Acquisition text Linguistics Linguistics University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Dissertation Ph.D.