The evolution of polysemy in child language
Document typeConference report
PublisherWorld Scientific Publishing Company
Rights accessOpen Access
It has been hypothesized that early stages of language have left traces of simpler forms of language, for instance, in child language (Bickerton, 1990; Jackendoff, 1999). Word learning biases in children (Saxton, 2010) suggest constraints that human language had to meet at its very origin. Here a candidate for a new (to the best of our knowledge) learning bias is investigated: a global preference for words with a small number of meanings unraveled by the analysis of massive electronic corpora in English and Dutch…
CitationCasas, B. [et al.]. The evolution of polysemy in child language. A: The Evolution of Language. "THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference (EVOLANG10)". Viena: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2014, p. 409-410.