Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Centre for Research in Language Development Throughout the Lifespan, Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex, Colchester, UK.
Infancy. 2022 Nov;27(6):1179-1196. doi: 10.1111/infa.12502. Epub 2022 Sep 6.
Do words that are both associatively and taxonomically related prime each other in the infant mental lexicon? We explore the impact of these semantic relations in the emerging lexicon. Using the head-turn preference procedure, we show that 18-month-old infants have begun to construct a semantic network of associatively and taxonomically related words, such as dog-cat or apple-cheese. We demonstrate that priming between words is longer-lasting when the relationship is both taxonomic and associative, as opposed to purely taxonomic, reflecting the associative boost reported in the adult priming literature. Our results demonstrate that 18-month-old infants are able to construct a lexical-semantic network based on associative and taxonomic relations between words in the network, and that lexical-semantic links are more robust when they are both associative and taxonomic in character. Furthermore, the manner in which activation is propagated through the emerging lexical-semantic network appears to depend upon the type of semantic relation between words. We argue that 18-month-old infants have a mental lexicon that shares important structural and processing properties with that of the adult system.
在婴儿心理词汇中，具有联想和分类关系的词是否会相互激活？我们探究了这些语义关系在新兴词汇中的影响。通过转头偏好程序，我们发现 18 个月大的婴儿已经开始构建一个具有联想和分类关系的词汇语义网络，例如狗-猫或苹果-奶酪。我们证明，当关系既是分类的又是联想的时，词与词之间的启动持续时间更长，这反映了成人启动文献中报告的联想增强。我们的研究结果表明，18 个月大的婴儿能够根据网络中词之间的联想和分类关系构建词汇语义网络，并且当词之间的词汇语义联系具有联想和分类特征时，它们更加稳健。此外，激活通过新兴词汇语义网络传播的方式似乎取决于词之间的语义关系类型。我们认为，18 个月大的婴儿的心理词汇与成人系统具有重要的结构和处理属性。
