Spoken-word recognition in 2-year-olds: The tug of war between phonological and semantic activation

Chow, Janette; Davies, Anne Aimola; Plunkett, Kim

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2016.08.004

Cited by 36 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…In prior work with adults, the presence of a related distractor slowed participants' search relative to baseline trials in which the distractors were unrelated to the target, as participants were more likely to fixate the related item while searching the array (Moores et al, ). Recent work using this paradigm showed similar evidence for children as young as 3 (Vales, Unger, & Fisher, ; see Chow et al, for related evidence with toddlers), suggesting that children co‐activated related items upon hearing the name of the target. However, because in those experiments the distractors did not systematically vary in strength, it remains an open question whether this co‐activation is modulated by the strength of the relation between the target and the related distractor.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 72%

“…For example, in priming studies, children's lexical decisions about a target word are modulated by a preceding semantically related word: School‐aged children respond faster on these primed trials relative to control trials (Simpson & Lorsbach, , ; Plaut & Booth, ; see also McCauley, Weil, & Sperber, ; Perraudin & Mounound, ). Related studies with infants and toddlers have shown that processing a target item (typically, its visual depiction; but see Willits et al, ) is facilitated by a preceding semantically related word (Arias‐Trejo & Plunkett, , ; Chow et al, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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When Stronger Knowledge Slows You Down: Semantic Relatedness Predicts Children's Co‐Activation of Related Items in a Visual Search Paradigm

Vales

Fisher

2019

Cognitive Science

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A large literature suggests that the organization of words in semantic memory, reflecting meaningful relations among words and the concepts to which they refer, supports many cognitive processes, including memory encoding and retrieval, word learning, and inferential reasoning. The co‐activation of related items has been proposed as a mechanism by which semantic knowledge influences cognition, and contemporary accounts of semantic knowledge propose that this co‐activation is graded—that it depends on how strongly related the items are in semantic memory. Prior research with adults yielded evidence supporting this prediction; however, there is currently no evidence of graded co‐activation early in development. This study provides the first evidence that in children the co‐activation of related items depends on their relational strength in semantic memory. Participants (N = 84, age range: 3–9 years) were asked to identify a target (e.g., bone) amid distractors. Children's responses were slowed down by the presence of a related distractor (e.g., puppy) relative to unrelated distractors (e.g., flower)—suggesting that children co‐activated related items upon hearing the name of the target. Importantly, the degree of this co‐activation was predicted by the strength of the target–distractor relation, such that distractors more strongly related to the targets slowed down children to a larger extent. These findings have important implications for understanding how organized semantic knowledge affects other cognitive processes across development.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 72%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When Stronger Knowledge Slows You Down: Semantic Relatedness Predicts Children's Co‐Activation of Related Items in a Visual Search Paradigm

Vales

Fisher

2019

Cognitive Science

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“…Multiple studies with adults have yielded evidence that semantic relatedness between targets and distractors influence visual search (Huettig & Altmann, 2005;Moores et al, 2003), and have used this phenomenon to investigate the relations that organize semantic knowledge (Mirman & Graziano, 2012;Mirman & Magnuson, 2009). According to recent research, similar effects of semantic distractors are evident in infants and young children (Bergelson & Aslin, 2017;Chow, Davies, & Plunkett, 2017;Vales & Fisher, 2019;Vales, Unger, & Fisher, 2017), highlighting the appropriateness of this approach for use with a broad developmental age range. Moreover, in the case of targets and related distractors whose labels co-occur, a study conducted by Yee, Overton, and Thompson-Schill (2009) provides evidence that looking at related distractors is likely driven by semantic links between the concepts that the labels denote.…”

Section: Present Studymentioning

confidence: 90%

The Role of Co-Occurrence Statistics in Developing Semantic Knowledge

Unger¹,

Vales²,

Fisher³

2018

Preprint

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The organization of our knowledge about the world into an interconnected network of concepts linked by relations profoundly impacts many facets of cognition, including attention, memory retrieval, reasoning, and learning. It is therefore crucial to understand how organized semantic representations are acquired. The present experiment investigated the contributions of readily observable environmental statistical regularities to semantic organization in childhood. Specifically, we investigated whether co-occurrence regularities with which entities or their labels more reliably occur together than with others: (1) Contribute to relations between concepts independently, and (2) Contribute to relations between concepts belonging to the same taxonomic category. Using childdirected speech corpora to estimate reliable co-occurrences between labels for familiar items, we constructed triads consisting of a target, a related distractor, and an unrelated distractor in which targets and related distractors consistently co-occurred (e.g., sock-foot), belonged to the same taxonomic category (e.g., sock-coat), or both (e.g., sock-shoe). We used an implicit, eye-gaze measure of relations between concepts based on the degree to which children (N=72, age 4-7 years) looked at related versus unrelated distractors when asked to look for a target. The results indicated that cooccurrence both independently contributes to relations between concepts, and contributes to relations between concepts belonging to the same taxonomic category. These findings suggest that sensitivity to the regularity with which different entities co-occur in children's environments shapes the organization of semantic knowledge during development. Implications for theoretical accounts and empirical investigations of semantic organization are discussed.

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“…First, 2‐year‐olds process familiar words faster if they also know many other words from the same category . In addition, eye‐tracking evidence suggests that when 2‐year‐olds hear a noun but do not see a picture of the word's referent (e.g., they hear the word banana but do not see a picture of a banana), they look to pictures of the word's taxonomic and associated neighbors (in this example, tomato or monkey ; ). Combined with the semantic priming studies cited earlier, this work suggests that lexical–semantic relations meaningfully influence the speed and pragmatics of early word comprehension, yet most researchers do not consider lexical–semantic structure when designing experiments or developing theories.…”

Section: The Effects Of Lexical–semantic Organization On Early Languamentioning

confidence: 99%

The Development of Lexical–Semantic Networks in Infants and Toddlers

Wojcik

2017

Child Dev Perspectives

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Researchers have focused for decades on how young children learn individual words. However, they have paid less attention to how children organize their word knowledge into the network of representations that underlies our ability to retrieve the right words efficiently and flexibly when we need them. Although methodological limits have made it difficult to study the development of lexical–semantic networks, in recent work with new paradigms, infants and toddlers have shown that they organize their vocabulary systematically via both categorical and associative relations from around age 2. Combined with work demonstrating that lexical–semantic relations affect early comprehension, production, and learning, this emerging area of research suggests that scientists and practitioners would benefit from more comprehensive theories of language learning that include not only vocabulary development, but also the development of lexical–semantic networks.

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Spoken-word recognition in 2-year-olds: The tug of war between phonological and semantic activation

Cited by 36 publications

References 69 publications

When Stronger Knowledge Slows You Down: Semantic Relatedness Predicts Children's Co‐Activation of Related Items in a Visual Search Paradigm

When Stronger Knowledge Slows You Down: Semantic Relatedness Predicts Children's Co‐Activation of Related Items in a Visual Search Paradigm

The Role of Co-Occurrence Statistics in Developing Semantic Knowledge

The Development of Lexical–Semantic Networks in Infants and Toddlers

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