Ragó Anett, Varga Zsuzsanna, Szabo Miklos
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health Sciences, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway.
Department of Cognitive Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
Front Psychol. 2023 Sep 21;14:1194770. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1194770. eCollection 2023.
An organized mental lexicon determines new information acquisition by orienting attention during language processing. Adult-like lexical-semantic knowledge organization has already been demonstrated in 24-month-olds. However, the outcomes of earlier studies have been contradictory in terms of the organizational capacities of 18-month-olds, thus our aim was to examine lexical-semantic organization in this younger age group. In prematurely born infants, audiovisual integration deficits have been found alongside disruptions in language perception. By including late preterm infants with corrected ages in our study, we aimed to test whether maturational differences influence lexical-semantic organization when vocabulary is growing rapidly.
We tested 47 late preterm and full-term 18- and 24-month-old infants by means of an infant-adapted target-absent task using a slightly modified version of the original visual world paradigm for eye tracker.
We found a longer fixation duration for the lexical and semantic distractors compared to the neutral pictures. Neither language proficiency nor age affected the looking time results. We found a dissociation by age between taxonomic and associative semantic relations. Maturational differences were detectable in the initial processing of taxonomic relations, as processing in the preterm group was slightly delayed and qualitatively different in the first half of the looking time. The size and composition of the expressive vocabulary differed only by age.
In general, our study demonstrated a stable lexical-semantic organization between 18 and 24 months of age, regardless of maturational differences.
一个有组织的心理词典通过在语言处理过程中引导注意力来决定新信息的获取。24个月大的幼儿已表现出类似成人的词汇语义知识组织。然而，早期研究的结果在18个月大幼儿的组织能力方面存在矛盾，因此我们的目的是研究这个较年幼年龄组的词汇语义组织。在早产婴儿中，已发现视听整合缺陷以及语言感知障碍。通过在我们的研究中纳入矫正年龄的晚期早产儿，我们旨在测试在词汇快速增长时，成熟度差异是否会影响词汇语义组织。
我们使用针对眼动仪的原始视觉世界范式的略微修改版本，通过适合婴儿的无目标任务对47名晚期早产和足月的18个月及24个月大的婴儿进行了测试。
我们发现与中性图片相比，词汇和语义干扰物的注视持续时间更长。语言能力和年龄均未影响注视时间结果。我们发现分类和联想语义关系在年龄上存在分离。在分类关系的初始处理中可检测到成熟度差异，因为早产组的处理在注视时间的前半段略有延迟且质量不同。表达性词汇的大小和组成仅因年龄而异。
总体而言，我们的研究表明，无论成熟度差异如何，18至24个月大的幼儿词汇语义组织稳定。
