Quality, not quantity, impacts the differentiation of near-synonyms

Abstract

How much information do language users need to differentiate potentially absolute synonyms into near-synonyms? How consistent must the information be? We present two simple experiments designed to investigate this. After exposure to two novel verbs, participants generalized them to positive or negative contexts. In Experiment 1, there was a tendency across conditions for the verbs to become differentiated by context, even following inconsistent, random, or neutral information about context during exposure. While a subset of participants matched input probabilities, a high proportion did not. As a consequence, the overall pattern was of growth in differentiation that did not closely track input distributions. Rather, there were two main patterns: When each verb had been presented consistently in a positive or negative context, participants overwhelmingly specialized both verbs in their output. When this was not the case, the verbs tended to become partially differentiated, with one becoming specialized and the other remaining less specialized. Experiment 2 replicated and expanded on Experiment 1 with the addition of a pragmatic judgment task and neutral contexts at test. Its results were consistent with Experiment 1 in supporting the conclusion that quality of input may be more important than quantity in the differentiation of synonyms.