0 a word that sounds the same or is spelled the same as another word but has a different meaning: --
1 a word that is spelled the same as another word but that does not have the same meaning: --
Only a small percentage of these children, however, were able to map the correct secondary meaning of the homonym.
While there is evidence documenting the effect of phonotactic probability on novel word learning, it is unclear whether phonotactic probability would influence homonym learning.
This would imply that children simply do not learn homonyms.
Learning the novel stimuli is similar to learning a new word that is not a homonym.
Children are shown sets of pictures which include a homonym pair, for example, bat (animal) and bat (sporting equipment).
This is an interesting finding in light of the fact that accurate homonym interpretation appears to be emerging, but not mastered, in this age group.
For example, being the complement of said does not force disambiguation of homonyms.
This difference is due to the low number of homonyms compared to polysemous entries.
