Temporal separation of meanings facilitates homophone learning

Theories of word learning often assume that learners adhere to a one-to-one form-to-meaning mapping hypothesis, reducing the number of possible meanings for newly encountered words and permitting learners to assume that known words correspond to their known referents. However, all languages contain homophones, which violate this assumption, raising the question of how children acquire such words. This article presents two studies evaluating whether the timing of homophone meanings relative to one another might play a role in their acquisition. Study 1 examined homophone uses in speech directed to 13 English-learning children from the CHILDES database and determined that multiple meanings of the same word only very rarely occur within a single discourse. When they do, uses with the same meaning are closer together in time than uses with different meanings, indicating the availability of meaning timing as a cue to homophony. Study 2 used the cross-situational word learning paradigm to manipulate the meaning timing of novel homophones. English-learning preschoolers (N = 94) were more likely to learn both meanings of a novel homophone when those meanings were separated in time, as compared to when the meanings were heard in an interleaved fashion. Taken together, these studies demonstrate that segregation of homophone meanings across time may support children's ability to map multiple meanings to a single word.