Comparing child word associations to adult associative norms: Evidence for child-specific associations with a strong priming effect in 3-year-olds.

Investigating how infants first establish relationships between words is a necessary step towards understanding how an interconnected network of semantic relationships develops in the adult lexical-semantic system. Stimuli selection for these child studies is critical since words must be both familiar and highly imageable. However, there has been a reliance on adult word association norms to inform stimuli selection in English infant studies to date, as no resource currently exists for child-specific word associations. We present three experiments that explore the strength of word-word relationships in 3-year-olds. Experiment 1 collected children's word associations (WA) (N = 150; female = 84, L1 = British English) and compared them to adult associative norms (Moss & Older, 1996; Nelson et al., 2004 (Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36(3), 402-407)). Experiment 2 replicated WAs from Experiment 1 in an online adaptation of the task (N = 24: 13 female, L1 = British English). Both experiments indicated a high proportion of child-specific WAs not represented in adult norms (Moss & Older, 1996; Nelson et al., 2004 (Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36(3), 402-407)). Experiment 3 tested noun-noun WAs from these responses in an online semantic priming study (N = 40: 19 female, L1 = British English) and found that association type modulated priming (F(2.57, 100.1) = 13.13, p <. 0001, generalized η2 = .19). This research presents a resource of child-specific imageable noun-noun word pair stimuli suitable for testing young children in word recognition and semantic priming studies.

Adapting language development research paradigms to online testing: Data from preferential looking, word learning and vocabulary assessment in toddlers.

During the recent pandemic, it became necessary to adapt lab-based studies to online experiments. To investigate the impact of online testing on the quality of data, we focus on three paradigms widely used in infant research: a word recognition task using the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm, a word learning task using the Switch task, and a language assessment tool (WinG) where children identify a target word amongst a set of picture cards. Our results for synchronous and asynchronous studies provide support for the robustness of online testing. In Experiment 1, robust word recognition was found in 24-month-old toddlers. In Experiment 2, 17-month-old infants consistently learned a new word. Finally, Experiment 3 demonstrated that 19- to 26-month-old children performed well on a language assessment test administered online. Overall, effect sizes or language scores were found to be higher than in lab-based studies. These experiments point to promising possibilities for reaching out to families around the world.