Ok that's one way to say it I also agree. I tend to not use the concept of "transfer learning" for how we learn because I think it's more appropriate for well-defined tasks and we are rarely confronted with tasks that are as well-defined as the ones we give to our models.

And transfer learning implies that you have to re-train a part of the model on a new task, and that's not exactly how I would define what we do. When I worked on reproducing how we learn words I instead implemented the solution as a way to put a new label on a representation we were already able to produce based on our unsupervised pretraining. I don't know which way is the correct one I just know that doing that works and that you can teach new words/labels to a model without retraining it.