Hedgehog Pillows and Squirrel Plates: Priming Semantic Structure in Children's Comprehension

Abstract We report three expression–picture‐matching experiments targeting preschoolers’ semantic processing. We assessed whether 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds’ interpretations of ambiguous novel noun–noun combinations (e.g., hedgehog pillow ) were affected by immediate language experience and what role lexical items played in this process. Experiment 1 demonstrated robust relational priming when prime and target combinations shared the same thematic relation with either head or modifier repetition. Experiment 2 showed inconclusive results when prime and target involved different heads and modifiers. Experiment 3 confirmed that priming was independent of visual similarities. Our results suggest that preschoolers have strong lexically dependent semantic representations that can be facilitated through individual experiences of language, though evidence is inconclusive regarding whether abstract semantic representations are stable at this age. This pattern is compatible with an adult model of lexico‐syntactic and semantic processing (Raffray et al., 2007), suggesting that usage‐based accounts of children's syntactic development might be straightforwardly extended to semantic development.