Electrophysiological exploration of early lexical–semantic processing

The goal of this study was to investigate lexical–semantic processing at an early phase of language development. Adults often communicate with children by using a speech mode called infant-directed speech that typically involves lexical and syntactic modifications such as onomatopoeias (Soderstrom, 2007). Here we asked how and when children start to replace such lexical modifications with conventional linguistic signs, such as common nouns. We recorded event-related brain potentials in two children of two age groups (16 to 20 months and 24 to 30 months) and in an adult control group during the presentation of the four conditions in which either common nouns or onomatopoeias were presented auditorily followed by either a congruent or incongruent image.
The younger group of children revealed a N400 effect for onomatopoeic words, while the older children showed a N400 effect only for common nouns. These different N400 effects to onomatopoeic utterances and common nouns across the two age groups suggest that these categories are differently organized in children’s semantic memory and that the acquisition of linguistic abilities affects and modifies semantic processing of different lexical information.

本研究旨在探讨语言发展早期阶段的词汇-语义处理。成人通常通过使用一种被称为婴儿导向语的言语模式与儿童进行沟通，该模式通常涉及诸如拟声词（Soderstrom, 2007）等词汇和句法上的修改。本研究旨在探究儿童何时以及如何开始用诸如普通名词等传统语言符号来取代此类词汇修改。我们在两个年龄组（16至20个月和24至30个月）的两个儿童以及一个成人对照组中，记录了在呈现四种条件下的事件相关脑电位，这些条件包括通过听觉呈现普通名词或拟声词，随后呈现与之相一致或不一致的图像。年幼的儿童组在拟声词上表现出N400效应，而年长的儿童仅在普通名词上显示出N400效应。这两个年龄组在拟声词和普通名词上的不同N400效应表明，这些类别在儿童的语义记忆中组织方式不同，并且语言能力的习得会影响并改变不同词汇信息的语义处理。