Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Extensive findings attest to an early-emerging sensitivity to statistical regularities, such as reliable co-occurrence betweenperceptual inputs. However, we know little about how such sensitivity may shape the organization of semantic memoryaccording to relations between concepts. To address this question, we designed a paradigm appropriate for a broad devel-opmental age-range in which participants identify whether either a word or a picture is the same or of the same thing as apreceding word (e.g., chicken followed by chicken or a chicken picture). Semantic effects are inferred from slower correctno responses to pairs that are related versus those that are unrelated. We used this paradigm to assess semantic effects in4-year-old children for pairs that co-occurred in child-directed speech (e.g., shoe-foot) or were taxonomically related (e.g.,fork-bowl). We found evidence of semantic effects in all conditions, suggesting that co-occurrence sensitivity contributesto relational knowledge in emerging semantic networks.