{"pk":28476,"title":"Children’s overextension as communication by multimodal chaining","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Young children often stretch terms to novel objects when theylack the proper adult words—a phenomenon known as overex-tension. Psychologists have proposed that overextension relieson the formation of a chain complex, such that new objectsmay be linked to existing referents of a word based on a diverseset of relations including taxonomic, analogical, and predicate-based knowledge. We build on these ideas by proposing a com-putational framework that creates chain complexes by multi-modal fusion of resources from linguistics, deep learning net-works, and psychological experiments. We test our models ina communicative scenario that simulates linguistic productionand comprehension between a child and a caretaker. Our re-sults show that the multimodal semantic space accounts forsubstantial variation in children’s overextension in the liter-ature, and our framework predicts overextension strategies.This work provides a formal approach to characterizing lin-guistic creativity of word sense extension in early childhood.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"language acquisition; linguistic creativity; overex-tension; word sense extension; multimodality; chaining; com-munication"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0g06w9b7","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Renato","middle_name":"Ferreira","last_name":"Pinto","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Toronto","department":""},{"first_name":"Yang","middle_name":"","last_name":"Xu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Toronto","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28476/galley/18347/download/"}]}