Vocabulary size and structure affect semantic competition in 18-month-olds.

ABSTRACT: Children recognize semantic relations between words early in development, yet it is unclear how this ability is affected by children's vocabulary size. We explore this question using an eye-tracking paradigm that manipulated the degree and kind of semantic overlap between labeled target objects and unnamed distractor objects to measure real-time recognition of known word meanings in 18-month-olds with varied vocabulary sizes (N = 136). Additionally, we assess how semantic network structure in children's vocabularies affects disambiguation among semantically related and unrelated words by measuring words' density of semantic interconnections within the semantic networks. Semantic overlap condition differently affected lexical recognition as a function of the kind of semantic overlap,

SUBMITTER: Kueser JB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12841939 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature