Abstract

Investigating how infants first establish relationships between words is a necessary step towards understanding the qualitative shift children make to an organised and complex interconnected network of semantic relationships which characterises a mature, adult lexical-semantic system. Since little is known about the word-word associations in infants that establish this network of meanings (Arias-Trejo & Plunkett, 2009), this thesis sought to, first, document the word associations (WA)s that young monolingual and bilingual children produce and then compare these to adult WAs. A concurrent aim was to establish a database of child-specific WAs as a resource for future studies. Second, to understand how a network of meaning establishes in different groups during infancy, an online semantic priming paradigm was developed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The aim was to see how words are organised in the emergent lexical-semantic system by replicating in-lab findings and extending these to explore different infant groups. In parallel, this paradigm was used to validate the WAs found in monolingual and bilingual children. Findings from Chapter 1 revealed that children share some of the WAs that adults exhibit in a mature lexical-semantic system. However, a large number of WAs shared by children were not represented in the WA norms of adults. This could indicate that adult norms under-represent the associations of children, as they might not capture the unique developmental stage and life experience of 3-year-olds. This research presents a resource of child-specific associated word pair stimuli for future studies. Findings from Chapter 2 indicate that lexical-semantic links might be more robust in the lexical-semantic system of a 3-year-old when they capture associative meaning compared to taxonomic meaning. Furthermore, running infant studies online can replicate in-lab findings, though it remains unclear if this is only true of certain paradigms.

Keywords

semantic priming, taxonomic meaning, associative meaning, word association, free association, language development, infant, toddler, child development, adult associative norms, online testing, Gorilla Experiment Builder, monolingual English, bilingual

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Date

2023

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