Abstract

Traditional explanations for the presence of ambiguous words in natural language have focused on the cost of added complexity that would accompany unambiguous languages. In these theories, ambiguity arises because it represents the optimal trade-off between the informational benefits from precision and the costs for rich languages. In this paper, we suggest that ambiguity remains an inevitable feature of learning languages even without complexity costs. We show that ambiguous words occur more frequently and will therefore be learned more readily, thus triggering more semantic activations between senses of the ambiguous word. We illustrate this through a game-theoretical example.