Developmental changes in phonological and semantic priming effects in Spanish-speaking toddlers.

Abstract

Research on the early lexical-semantic system has described how toddlers organize word representations based on semantic and phonological features. This study is a longitudinal investigation of the development of this organization during infancy. Middle-high socioeconomic status Mexican toddlers (n = 28, 15 female) were presented with a preferential looking task using an eye-tracker at 18, 21, and 24 months of age, manipulating semantic and phonological lexical links. The experimental task consisted of presenting an auditory label, which was phonologically or semantically related or unrelated, with a displayed target image. Mean proportion of target looking, time-course of fixations, pupillometry, and vocabulary network analysis were used to describe the properties of priming effects. The results showed that phonological priming developed earlier than semantic priming, and that they were produced by behavioral interference. In addition, pupil dilation showed differential use of cognitive effort in critical developmental periods. Finally, the density of vocabulary networks correlated with semantic effects, and vocabulary size and local network features with phonological effects. These findings extend our understanding of the development of the lexical-semantic system during infancy.

The role of systematicity in early referent selection

“…Indeed, similar changes to vocabulary structure appear to be implicated in the word recognition literature. Thus, older children with more dense networks and larger vocabularies show greater interference effects in semantic and phonological priming studies (Arias‐Trejo et al., 2022; Avila‐Varela et al., 2021). In line with this developmental trajectory, the reliance on form‐meaning systematicity may emerge later, with greater lexical maturity and more complex vocabulary structure.…”

The Phonological Interference of Balinese Language of Jagaraga Dialect in English Pronunciation

“…There are 6 vowels in Balinese language, that is; /i, e, a, ɔ, u, o/. The Balinese language does not have diphthongs (Arias-Trejo et al, 2022;Swandana, 2018). Vowel phonemes /i,e,u,o/ has their allophones and they are more dominant than the other vowel.…”

Bottom-up processes dominate early word recognition in toddlers

“…This approach has been successfully used in studies of preferential looking times with toddlers (Angulo- & Arias-Trejo, 2021;Arias-Trejo et al, 2022). This method provides a non-supervised approach to detecting temporal segments in which time series are different between conditions using a permutation approach to create a null hypothesis.…”