Phonological Priming in Infancy

Adults recognise words faster given prior exposure to phonologically or semantically related words compared to unrelated words, suggesting that words are organised in the adult lexicon based on their phonological and semantic properties and that word recognition implicates not just the heard word, but also related words. The organisation of words in the infant lexicon, however, remains unexplored. The current experiments examine the phonological organisation of the infant lexicon using a picture priming technique, hitherto not used with infants: 18- and 24-month-old infants were faster at recognising words when preceded by phonologically related primes compared to unrelated primes. In addition, word recognition in 24-month-olds was impaired when the number of phonologically similar words known to infants was large, suggesting that, the 24-month-old mental lexicon has begun to be organised on the basis of the phonological properties of words.