The polysemy of the words that children learn over time

 Here we study polysemy as a potential learning bias in vocabulary learning in children. Words of low polysemy
 could be preferred as they reduce the disambiguation effort for the listener. However, such preference could be a side-effect of
 another bias: the preference of children for nouns in combination with the lower polysemy of nouns with respect to other
 part-of-speech categories.
 Our results show that mean polysemy in children increases over time in two phases, i.e. a fast growth till the
 31st month followed by a slower tendency towards adult speech. In contrast, this evolution is not found in adults interacting with
 children. This suggests that children have a preference for non-polysemous words in their early stages of vocabulary acquisition.
 Interestingly, the evolutionary pattern described above weakens when controlling for syntactic category (noun, verb, adjective or
 adverb) but it does not disappear completely, suggesting that it could result from a combination of a standalone bias for low
 polysemy and a preference for nouns.