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Children's resistance to homonymy: an experimental study of pseudohomonyms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2005

DEVIN M. CASENHISER
Affiliation:
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Abstract

Research in diachronic linguistics has shown that homonyms are often dispreferred in language. This study proposes that this trend is mirrored in the difficulties that children encounter in mapping homonyms. Two experiments are presented in support of this proposition. In Experiment 1, 16 preschool children (mean age=4;6) are shown to perform quite well on tasks requiring them to assign novel meanings to nonsense words. They perform poorly, however, on tasks requiring them to assign a different, unrelated meaning to a known word. Experiment 2 (N=18, mean age=4;5) shows that preschoolers' performance on this task, however, improves when a known word appears in a syntactic frame that is not appropriate for the word (as when a verb appears in a noun syntactic frame), thereby providing a strong indication that a new meaning is appropriate.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I am very grateful for the advice and guidance of Adele Goldberg both in the planning stages of this study as well as in the preparation of this paper. I am also indebted to Dan Silverman whose thought-provoking phonology courses planted the initial seeds for this research. Thanks as well to the JCL editors and referees whose suggestions significantly improved this paper (as always, any remaining short-comings are mine). Finally, I thank the teachers, students and parents at Country-side and Next Generation schools for assisting with and participating in this study.