Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The organization of semantic knowledge according to relations between concepts influences many facets of highercognition. Therefore, understanding the origins of relations knowledge is a key focus of cognitive development research. Thisstudy investigated the contributions of environmental statistical regularities to relations knowledge in preschool-age children.Using CHILDES to estimate co-occurrence between familiar items, we constructed triads consisting of a target, related distrac-tor, and unrelated distractor in which targets and related distractors consistently co-occurred (e.g., sock-foot), belonged to thesame taxonomic category (e.g., sock-coat), or both (e.g., sock-shoe). Using a Visual World paradigm, we then measured rela-tions knowledge as the degree to which children looked at related versus unrelated distractors when asked to look for targets.The results revealed that co-occurrence, regardless of taxonomic relatedness, influenced whether participants looked signifi-cantly more at related versus unrelated distractors. These findings demonstrate that co-occurrence regularities between entitiesin the environment shape knowledge organization.