Experience and maturation: The contribution of co‐occurrence regularities in language to the development of semantic organization

With development knowledge becomes organized according to semantic links, including early‐developing associative (e.g., juicy–apple) and gradually developing taxonomic links (e.g., apple–pear). Word co‐occurrence regularities may foster these links: Associative links may form from direct co‐occurren...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Child development 2023-01, Vol.94 (1), p.142-158
Main Authors: Savic, Olivera, Unger, Layla, Sloutsky, Vladimir M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ability
Adult
Adults
Associative Learning
Child Development
Children
Developmental Stages
Empirical
Female
Humans
Language
Language Acquisition
Language Development
Maturation
Preschool Children
Semantics
Taxonomy
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Summary:With development knowledge becomes organized according to semantic links, including early‐developing associative (e.g., juicy–apple) and gradually developing taxonomic links (e.g., apple–pear). Word co‐occurrence regularities may foster these links: Associative links may form from direct co‐occurrence (e.g., juicy–apple), and taxonomic links from shared co‐occurrence (e.g., apple and pear co‐occur with juicy). Four experiments (2017–2020) investigated this possibility with 4‐ to 8‐year‐olds (N = 148, 82 female) and adults (N = 116, 35 female) in a U.S. city with 58.6% White; 29.0% Black, and 5.8% Asian demographics. Results revealed earlier development of the abilities to form direct (ds > 0.536) than the abilities to form shared co‐occurrence‐based links (ds > 1.291). We argue that the asynchronous development of abilities to form co‐occurrence‐based links may explain developmental changes in semantic organization.
ISSN:0009-3920
1467-8624
DOI:10.1111/cdev.13844