We focus here on the interplay of lexico-semantic structure and language processing in semantically related and unrelated contexts in 18-month-old toddlers. Fundamental questions include: How does lexico-semantic structure initially develop? When does nascent structure in the emerging lexicon interact with real-time linguistic processing? Less is known regarding how structure initially emerges and interacts in language processing, although understanding this process has the potential to provide crucial insight into how learners of all ages represent and interpret connections among word meanings. Typically, our theoretical understanding of lexico-semantic dynamics has been informed from findings in the adult psycholinguistic literature, which has explored lexical processing in individuals who know many thousands of words and have correspondingly complex semantic networks. For instance, semantically related concepts can alternatively facilitate or interfere with language processing in adults. Lexico-semantic structure, in turn, interacts with language processing. The mature lexicon encodes relations between words along numerous dimensions, including semantic similarity. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: Data are available from Open Science Framework: (DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/4VDGU).įunding: AB received R03-DC013638 and P50HD052120 from the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, which provided support for this work. Received: FebruAccepted: JPublished: July 11, 2019Ĭopyright: © 2019 Borovsky, Peters. PLoS ONE 14(7):Įditor: Masatoshi Koizumi, Tohoku University, JAPAN We also consider further directions for developmental change in these patterns.Ĭitation: Borovsky A, Peters RE (2019) Vocabulary size and structure affects real-time lexical recognition in 18-month-olds. We consider these findings in light of accounts of adult word recognition that posits that different levels of structure index strong and weak activation from nearby and distant semantic neighbors.
The results suggest that, while semantic structure at multiple granularities is measurable even in small lexicons, mechanisms of semantic interference and facilitation are driven by the development of structure at different granularities. Category level structure facilitated word recognition in 18-month-olds with smaller productive vocabularies, while overall lexical connectivity interfered with word recognition for toddlers with relatively larger vocabularies. Semantic structure and vocabulary size differentially impacted processing in each task. Participants completed two interleaved eye-tracked word recognition tasks involving semantically unrelated and related picture contexts, which sought to measure the impact of lexical facilitation and interference on processing, respectively. We explore the emergence of these processing dynamics in 18-month-olds (N = 79) using a novel approach that calculates individualized semantic structure at multiple granularities in participants’ productive vocabularies. The mature lexicon encodes semantic relations between words, and these connections can alternately facilitate and interfere with language processing.
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