Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2009 Dec 27;364(1536):3633-47. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2009.0146.
When and how do infants develop a semantic system of words that are related to each other? We investigated word-word associations in early lexical development using an adaptation of the inter-modal preferential looking task where word pairs (as opposed to single target words) were used to direct infants' attention towards a target picture. Two words (prime and target) were presented in quick succession after which infants were presented with a picture pair (target and distracter). Prime-target word pairs were either semantically and associatively related or unrelated; the targets were either named or unnamed. Experiment 1 demonstrated a lexical-semantic priming effect for 21-month olds but not for 18-month olds: unrelated prime words interfered with linguistic target identification for 21-month olds. Follow-up experiments confirmed the interfering effects of unrelated prime words and identified the existence of repetition priming effects as young as 18 months of age. The results of these experiments indicate that infants have begun to develop semantic-associative links between lexical items as early as 21 months of age.
婴儿何时以及如何发展出相互关联的单词语义系统？我们使用一种改良的跨模态偏好注视任务来研究早期词汇发展中的词词联想，该任务使用词对（而不是单个目标词）引导婴儿的注意力指向目标图片。两个词（前提词和目标词）快速连续呈现，然后向婴儿呈现一对图片（目标图片和干扰图片）。前提词-目标词对要么在语义上和联想上相关，要么不相关；目标词要么被命名，要么未被命名。实验 1 表明 21 个月大的婴儿存在词汇语义启动效应，但 18 个月大的婴儿则没有：不相关的前提词会干扰 21 个月大的婴儿对语言目标的识别。后续实验证实了不相关的前提词的干扰效应，并确定了早在 18 个月大时就存在重复启动效应。这些实验的结果表明，婴儿早在 21 个月大时就已经开始在词汇项目之间发展语义联想关系。
