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Spatial language is often used metaphorically to describe other domains, including time (long sound) and pitch (high sound). How does experience with these metaphors shape the ability to associate space with other domains? Here, we tested 3- to 6-year-old English-speaking children and adults with a cross-domain matching task. We probed cross-domain relations that are expressed in English metaphors for time and pitch (length-time and height-pitch), as well as relations that are unconventional in English but expressed in other languages (size-time and thickness-pitch). Participants were tested with a perceptual matching task, in which they matched between spatial stimuli and sounds of different durations or pitches, and a linguistic matching task, in which they matched between a label denoting a spatial attribute, duration, or pitch, and a picture or sound representing another dimension. Contrary to previous claims that experience with linguistic metaphors is necessary for children to make cross-domain mappings, children performed above chance for both familiar and unfamiliar relations in both tasks, as did adults. Children’s performance was also better when a label was provided for one of the dimensions, but only when making length-time, size-time, and height-pitch mappings (not thickness-pitch mappings). These findings suggest that, although experience with metaphorical language is not necessary to make cross-domain mappings, labels can promote these mappings, both when they have familiar metaphorical uses (e.g., English ‘long’ denotes both length and duration), and when they describe dimensions that share a common ordinal reference frame (e.g., size and duration, but not thickness and pitch). 

It is well-known that children rapidly learn words, following a range of heuristics. What is less well appreciated is that – because most words are polysemous and have multiple meanings (e.g., ‘glass’ can label a material and drinking vessel) – children will often be learning a new meaning for a known word, rather than an entirely new word. Across four experiments we show that children flexibly adapt a well-known heuristic – the shape bias – when learning polysemous words. Consistent with previous studies, we find that children and adults preferentially extend a new object label to other objects of the same shape. But we also find that when a new word for an object (‘a gup’) has previously been used to label the material composing that object (‘some gup’), children and adults override the shape bias, and are more likely to extend the object label by material (Experiments 1 and 3). Further, we find that, just as an older meaning of a polysemous word constrains interpretations of a new word meaning, encountering a new word meaning leads learners to update their interpretations of an older meaning (Experiment 2). Finally, we find that these effects only arise when learners can perceive that a word’s meanings are related, not when they are arbitrarily paired (Experiment 4). Together, these findings show that children can exploit cues from polysemy to infer how new word meanings should be extended, suggesting that polysemy may facilitate word learning and invite children to construe categories in new ways.