Monday, Nov. 18: Mahesh Srinivasan, "The role of children's cognitive biases in the structure of the lexicon: Cross-linguistic evidence from polysemy"

Please join us for a presentation by Professor Mahesh Srinivasan, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley.

The role of children's cognitive biases in the structure of the lexicon: Cross-linguistic evidence from polysemy

Abstract: Many words in English shift in meaning according to systematic patterns. For example, words can label animals and their meat (e.g., chicken, lamb, and fish), or artists and their produced works (e.g., Picasso, Tolstoy, Mozart). These patterns are also generative, in the sense that they can be extended to new words: e.g., a name for a new animal can label its meat, as in “The dax was tasty.” In this talk, I’ll explore what factors might account for the structure of polysemy. Drawing on findings from children’s acquisition of polysemous words, and especially from a new cross-linguistic survey of polysemy, I will suggest that different languages may develop broadly similar patterns of polysemy, because these patterns have been adapted over time to be easily learnable for children, given their cognitive biases. This possible fit between the structure of polysemy and children’s conceptual structure suggests that polysemy may act to speed the process of building a lexicon: by picking up on patterns, children may spontaneously infer new meanings for words.

Monday, November 18, 12:00-1:30pm in 3105 Tolman Hall