Many words in the English language have multiple meanings. Homophones are words with multiple meanings that are not semantically related (like bat the animal, and baseball bat). Polysemes are words with multiple meanings that are related (like book, where we can refer to both the physical object, and its content). 

We are interested in how the meanings of these words are learned cross-situationally, and whether language learners are able to use one meaning to infer another polysemous meaning. If this is true, then polysemes should be more easily learned than homophones. Through their research, Floyd & Goldberg (2021) observed that children and adults do in fact learn polysemy more efficiently than homophones. However, this was not tested cross-situationally, across multiple trials. 

By conducting 2 experiments, we tested how polysemy assists in word learning cross-situationally. We used Floyd & Goldberg's stimuli that were artificial and visually similar, to see how the acquisition of polysemy occurred over multiple trials. We then conducted the same experiment with naturally occurring polysemous pairs that are not present in the English language, to see if the same patterns showed.