Mani, N.
Georg-August Universität Göttingen, Germany
Does hearing a word lead to the activation of phonologically related words in the infant lexicon? Tests of lexical activation in adults and five-year-olds examines prime-target pairs that are phono-semantically related (cup (prime) - dog (target)) to each other. Here dog is semantically related to a cohort member of cup (cat). Since dog and cup do not share any sounds, the priming effects reported must derive from priming of words phonologically related to cup (cat, i.e., the sub-prime), and subsequent cascaded priming of words semantically related to cat. This paper investigates the patterns of phono-semantic priming displayed by younger children at 24-months of age. Twenty-four-month-olds were presented with a prime, followed by a standard target recognition task. During related trials, the target word was phono-semantically related to the prime. During unrelated trials, the target and the prime were not phonologically, semantically or phono-semantically related. Experiment 1 tested onset-overlapping phono-semantically related prime-target pairs (e.g., cup (prime) - [cat (sub-prime)] - dog (target)). Experiment 2 examined rhymo-semantically related prime-target pairs (hat (prime) - [cat (sub-prime)] - dog (target)) in order to examine the role of phonological overlap in driving lexical activation. In Experiment 1, infants looked longer at the target in unrelated trials compared to primed trials. When the phonological overlap between the prime and the sub-prime was increased in Experiment 2, infants now looked longer at the target in primed trials compared to unrelated trials. The contrast between Experiments 1 and 2 suggests an important role for phonological overlap (between the prime and the sub-prime) in driving the pattern of results. Furthermore, these effects can only derive from activation of words phonologically and semantically related to the prime label, providing evidence that hearing a word leads to the activation of related words during word recognition.