Learning polysemous word senses

This chapter explores what is known about how polysemous, or semantically related, senses of a word are learned in native language. Existing evidence has shown that both children and adults are surprisingly skilled at learning and understanding new senses that are conventional, predictable extensions of well-established senses. The finding that even preschoolers show some understanding of how systematic and predictable polysemy can be presents current models of word learning with a challenge, in that most predict children to struggle to learn multiple form-to-meaning mappings.