Cascading activation across levels of representation in children's lexical processing

YI TING HUANG, JESSE SNEDEKER
2010 Journal of Child Language  
A B S T R A C T Recent work in adult psycholinguistics has demonstrated that activation of semantic representations begins long before phonological processing is complete. This incremental propagation of information across multiple levels of analysis is a hallmark of adult language processing but how does this ability develop ? In two experiments, we elicit measures of incremental activation of semantic representations during word recognition in children. Five-year-olds were instructed to
more » ... a target (logs) while their eye-movements were measured to a competitor (key) that was semantically related to an absent phonological associate (lock). We found that, like adults, children made increased looks to competitors relative to unrelated control items. However, unlike adults, children continued to look at the competitor even after the target word was uniquely identified and were more likely to incorrectly select this item. Altogether, these results suggest that early lexical processing involves cascading activation but less efficient resolution of competing entries. I N T R O D U C T I O N One of the hallmarks of models of adult language comprehension is the notion that linguistic information incrementally propagates across different [*] We would like to thank Jessica Hoy and Charlotte Mucchetti for their assistance in data collection and coding. We are also grateful to the children and teachers at the McGlynn Elementary School in Medford, MA for their participation in this study.
doi:10.1017/s0305000910000206 pmid:20738890 fatcat:ildv2rlzpnddzcpotwwwcfgd6m