Lexical priming and semantic integration reflected in the event-related potential of 14-month-olds

This study investigates by means of the event-related brain potential whether mechanisms of lexical priming and semantic integration are already developed in 14-month-olds. While looking at coloured pictures of known objects children were presented with basic-level words that were either congruous or incongruous to the pictures. The event-related potential of 14-month-olds revealed an early negativity in the lateral frontal brain region for congruous words, and a later N400-like negativity for incongruous words. These results indicate that both lexical priming and semantic integration are already present as early as 14 months.

[1]  P. Holcomb.  Semantic priming and stimulus degradation: implications for the role of the N400 in language processing. , 2007, Psychophysiology.

[2]  Helen J. Neville,et al.  Language Experience and the Organization of Brain Activity to Phonetically Similar Words: ERP Evidence from 14- and 20-Month-Olds , 2004, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[3]  A. Friederici,et al.  N400-like Semantic Incongruity Effect in 19-Month-Olds: Processing Known Words in Picture Contexts , 2004, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[4]  Angela D. Friederici,et al.  Brain Signatures of Syntactic and Semantic Processes during Children's Language Development , 2004, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[5]  G. Thierry,et al.  Familiar words capture the attention of 11-month-olds in less than 250 ms , 2003, Neuroreport.

[6]  P. Holcomb,et al.  Word and Picture Processing in Children: An Event-Related Potential Study , 2002, Developmental neuropsychology.

[7]  P. Holcomb,et al.  Event-related potentials during discourse-level semantic integration of complex pictures. , 2002, Brain research. Cognitive brain research.

[8]  H. Neville,et al.  Language Acquisition and Cerebral Specialization in 20-Month-Old Infants , 1993, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[9]  M. Rugg,et al.  Event-related potentials and the semantic matching of pictures , 1990, Brain and Cognition.

[10]  Dennis L. Molfese,et al.  Auditory evoked responses to names for different objects: Cross-modal processing as a basis for infant language acquisition. , 1990 .

[11]  M. Kutas,et al.  Reading senseless sentences: brain potentials reflect semantic incongruity. , 1980, Science.

[12]  S. Geisser,et al.  On methods in the analysis of profile data , 1959 .

[13]  G. Dawson,et al.  Human behavior and the developing brain , 1994 .

[14]  H. Neville,et al.  Visual and auditory sentence processing: A developmental analysis using event‐related brain potentials , 1992 .