Ávila-Varela, D. 1 , Mani, N. 1 & Arias-Trejo, N. 2
1 Georg-August University
2 Universidad Autónoma de México
Children begin to speak their first words approximately at 12 months old, suggesting that lexical acquisition begins early in childhood. By 18-months, children can recognize a word faster when primed by an image phonologically related to the target word (e.g. dog-door) relative to a phonologically unrelated image (e.g. dog-boat; Mani & Plunkett, 2010). And by 21-months children begin to develop semantic-associative links between lexical items (e.g. sheep-cow; Arias-Trejo & Plunkett, 2009) and prioritise semantic information over colour information in word recognition by 24 months (e.g. children orient faster to an image of a cookie relative to a yellow cup upon hearing the prime banana; Mani, Johnson, McQueen & Huettig, 2013). However priming studies made to date have a transversal or between groups design. In the current study, we carry out a longitudinal design to test phonological and semantic priming effects in German and Mexican monolingual infants from 18- to 24-months old, to test how individual variables such as vocabulary size, language and culture influence word recognition through the development.