CogSci 2025

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August 02, 2025

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San Francisco, United States

keywords:

animal communication

semantics of language

comparative analysis

computational modeling

language acquisition

Word meaning extension refers to the process by which a single word form develops multiple related meanings. Young children exhibit the capacity to extend word meaning, and previous research shows that such word overextension relies on multimodal semantic knowledge. We explore the evolutionary trace of word meaning extension by asking whether nonhuman animals might have this shared capacity. We compare meaning extension in children with the attested cases of overextension collected from the YouTube channel of a Grey Parrot, Apollo, who has acquired some English words. Our results show that parrot overextension can be predicted by a multimodal child overextension model better than baselines, which demonstrates that Grey Parrot may be using semantic knowledge similar to children for choosing words to express new referents. Our finding suggests that meaning extension is a cognitive ability identifiable in species about 320 million years apart from humans.

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