The aim of this research is to present a Spanish Word Association Norms (WAN) database of concrete nouns. The database includes 234 stimulus words (SWs) and 67,622 response words (RWs) provided by 478 young Mexican adults. Eight different measures were calculated to quantitatively analyze word-word relationships: 1) Associative strength of the first associate, 2) Associative strength of the second associate, 3) Sum of associative strength of first two associates, 4) Difference in associative strength between first two associates, 5) Number of different associates, 6) Blank responses, 7) Idiosyncratic responses, and 8) Cue validity of the first associate. The resulting database is an important contribution given that there are no published word association norms for Mexican Spanish. The results of this study are an important resource for future research regarding lexical networks, priming effects, semantic memory, among others.

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Background: Children and adults with neurotypical development employ linguistic information to predict and anticipate information. Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) have weaknesses in language production and the domain of grammar but relative strengths in language comprehension and the domain of semantics. What is not clear is the extent to which they can use linguistic information, as it unfolds in real time, to anticipate upcoming information correctly. Aims: To investigate whether children and young people with DS employ verb information to predict and anticipate upcoming linguistic information. Methods & Procedures: A preferential looking task was performed, using an eye-tracker, with children and teenagers with DS and a typically developing (TD) control group matched by sex and mental age (average = 5.48 years). In each of 10 trials, two images were presented, a target and a distractor, while participants heard a phrase that contained a semantically informative verb (e.g., 'eat') or an uninformative verb (e.g., 'see').Outcomes & Results: Both DS and TD control participants could anticipate the target upon hearing an informative verb, and prediction skills were positively correlated with mental age in those with DS. Conclusions & Implications: This work demonstrates for the first time that children and teenagers with DS can predict linguistic information based on semantic cues from verbs, and that sentence processing is driven by predictive relationships between verbs and arguments, as in children with typical development. Clinicians can take advantage of these prediction skills, using them in therapy to support weaker areas. What this paper addsWhat is already known on the subject Children and adults, under typical development, anticipate information based on verbal cues. After hearing a semantically informative verb, children prefer to look at a target that matches such a verb than to a distractor. People with DS exhibit good comprehension skills at the vocabulary level, particularly, in some grammatical categories as nouns or verbs. Can they use verbal comprehension to anticipated linguistic information? What this paper adds to existing knowledgeThis study demonstrates that children and teenagers with DS anticipate upcoming information upon hearing a semantically informative verb. Also, that prediction skills are associated with mental age. It concludes that people with DS have sophisticated comprehension skills that call for new models to study their processing of language.Verb-mediated anticipatory eye movements in people with Down syndrome 757 What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work?The results could contribute to the development of improvements in language interventions. Prediction skills facilitate real-time interactions with other people and the environment. Training in language prediction skills could also assist with other cognitive difficulties of people with DS, such as the production of number and tense morphemes.

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