Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Past research has shown that adults can access multiplemeanings for a word, but little work has examined howchildren process multiple meanings. We tested 48 4- to 7-year-old children and 48 adults in a touchscreen picturerecognition task. Two meanings of the same word weredisplayed on successive trials, which varied according towhether the 2 meanings were unrelated (homonyms), related(polysemes), or repeated (same-meaning). Adults identifiedthe second meaning more quickly than the first in allconditions and to the same extent. Children, however,identified the second meaning more quickly only onpolysemy and same-meaning trials. This difference suggeststhat children are less capable of co-activating unrelatedmeanings, which raises the possibility that children mustlearn to do so over development. Despite the ubiquity ofpolysemy in language, our work is the first to show thatchildren’s processing of word representations is organizedby similarity.