Wordform variability in infants’ language environment and its effects on early word learning

Most research regarding early word learning in English tends to make the simplifying assumption that there exists a one-to-one mapping between concrete objects and their labels. In the current work, we provide evidence that runs counter to this assumption, aligning English with more morphologically-rich languages. We suggest that even in a morphologically-poor language like English, real world language input to infants does not provide tidy 1-to-1 mappings. Instead, infants encounter many variant wordforms for familiar nouns (e.g. dog∼doggy∼dogs). We explore this wordform variability in 44 English-learning infants’ naturalistic environments using a longitudinal corpus of infant-available speech. We look at both the frequency and composition of wordform variability. We find two broad categories of variability: referent-changing alterations, where words were pluralized or compounded (e.g. coat∼raincoats); and wordplay, where words changed form without a notable change in referent (e.g. bird∼birdie). We further find that wordplay occurs with a limited number of lemmas that are usually early-learned, high-frequency, and shorter. When looking at all wordform variability, we find that individual words with higher levels of wordform variability are learned earlier than words with fewer wordforms, over and above the effect of frequency.