Briony Waite
Department of Psychology
Harvard University

Lexical access during story listening across development

Recognizing and retrieving words from the mental lexicon is a key aspect of understanding language in real time. Previous work with adults has shown that the amplitude of the N400, an ERP component related to accessing the meaning and linguistic form of words, is sensitive to bottom-up cues (i.e. word frequency) when words are presented in isolation. Within a larger discourse, however, the N400 in adults is more sensitive to top-down cues (e.g. word predictability). In this talk, I will present data investigating children’s lexical access across development. We use a naturalistic story-listening paradigm to collect a large amount of EEG data from children in three age groups: 5-year-olds, 9-year-olds, and 14-year-olds. Our results demonstrate a robust effect of predictability on the N400 in the older children (9- and 14-year-olds), with effects of vocabulary ability in the 9-year-olds but not 14-year-olds. Preliminary data from the 5-year-olds suggests interesting developmental differences. I will discuss our task, which is child friendly, naturalistic, and engaging, allowing us to work with age groups that are critical for understanding language development but are often understudied with this particular methodology in psycholinguistic research, and will present future directions based on these findings. If there is time, I will end by discussing some pilot data extending these findings to second language learners.