TY - JOUR
T1 - Activation of phonological and semantic codes in toddlers
AU - Mani, Nivedita
AU - Durrant, Samantha
AU - Floccia, Caroline
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was funded by the German Initiative for Excellence – Institutional Strategy (Experiment 1 and write-up) and The British Academy (Experiment 2).
PY - 2012/5
Y1 - 2012/5
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - phono-semantic priming
KW - phonological priming
KW - toddlers
KW - word recognition
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84862258824&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jml.2012.03.003
DO - 10.1016/j.jml.2012.03.003
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84862258824
SN - 0749-596X
VL - 66
SP - 612
EP - 622
JO - Journal of Memory and Language
JF - Journal of Memory and Language
IS - 4
ER -