Delle Luche, C.
University of Plymouth
Children build up a lexicon progressively, and there is still debate whether early words emerge as semantically isolated lexical islands or are already linked together by semantic relationships. Evidence to date reported word-to-word priming in children as young as 21 months of age, but results with younger toddlers is not very conclusive. The present experiment evaluates whether the lexicon of 18-month-olds already contains semantic relations between spoken words in an all-auditory Head-Turning Paradigm. Children are presented with lists of words belonging to the same semantic category (e.g., consecutive names of animals), or to a mix of two categories (e.g., names of clothes and body parts mixed together). If words activate other semantically related words, children should display more attention, or familiarise slower, to single category lists over mixed categories lists. Children heard two blocks of 6 lists of words, starting for example with 6 Same Category lists (3 lists of animal names and 3 lists of food items) and ending with 6 Mixed Category lists (6 lists of body parts and clothes mixed together). Listening times towards each type of list was recorded. With 36 infants successfully tested, we found that children listened marginally longer to the Same Category lists overall (F(1,33) = 4.00, p = .053, ?2 = 0.10). When restricting the analysis to the 25 children who know at least 50% of the words in each category, this effect is significant (F(1,23) = 6.70, p = .016, ?2 = 0.22), with 12.64s of average listening time for the Same Category (SD = 0.81) compared to 10.60s in the Mixed Category (SD = 0.89). These findings point to the existence of semantic relations between words in the early lexicon, complementing earlier reports of semantic links at 21 months (e.g. Arias-Trejo & Plunkett, 2009).