Activation of phonological and semantic codes in toddlers

• Published in: Journal of memory and language Vol. 66; no. 4; pp. 612 - 622
• Main Authors: Mani, Nivedita, Durrant, Samantha, Floccia, Caroline
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier Inc 01.05.2012; Elsevier; Elsevier BV
• Subjects: Biological and medical sciences; Child; Child development; Children & youth; Developmental psychology; Experiments; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Language; Phonetics; Phono-semantic priming; Phonological priming; Priming; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Semantics; Semiotics; Toddlers; Word Recognition; Young Children; Word recognition; Phonological priming; Toddlers; Phono-semantic priming; Preschool age; Human; Semantic relation; Word; Priming effect; Cognition; Activation; Language; Semantics; Language development; Phonology; Child; Recognition
• ISSN: 0749-596X; 1096-0821
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2012.03.003

► Processes underlying word recognition by toddlers. ► Evidence of the phono-semantic priming in 2-year-olds. ► Evidence of influence of phonological overlap in word recognition. ► Word recognition in toddlers involves processing of related words. What are the processes underlying word recognition in the toddler lexicon? Work with adults suggests that, by 5-years of age, hearing a word leads to cascaded activation of other phonologically, semantically and phono-semantically related words (Huang & Snedeker, 2010; Marslen-Wilson & Zwitserlood, 1989). Given substantial differences in children’s sensitivity to phonological and semantic relationships between words in the first few years of life (Arias-Trejo & Plunkett, 2010; Newman, Samuelson, & Gupta, 2009; Storkel & Hoover, 2012), the current set of experiments investigated whether children younger than five also show such phono-semantic priming. Using a picture-priming task, Experiments 1 and 2 presented 2-year-olds with phono-semantically related prime-target pairs, where the label for the prime image is phonologically related (Experiment 1 – onset CV overlap, Experiment 2 – rhyme VC overlap) to a semantic associate of the target label. Across both experiments, toddlers recognised a word faster when this was preceded by a phono-semantically related prime relative to an unrelated prime. Overall, the results provide strong evidence that word recognition involves cascaded processing of phono-semantically related words by 2-years of age.