Structural Alignment Across Visual and Linguistic Modalities: A Developmental Refinement Perspective

This study investigates the structural alignment of conceptual representations accessed from visual and linguistic modalities in 8-9-year-old children and adults. Using a Spatial Arrangement (SpAM) task, participants organized familiar items from two categories – household items (HHI) and vegetables & fruits (VF) – presented separately as images and written words on a two-dimensional grid. Representational dissimilarity matrices were computed based on item distances within each modality and analyzed for structural alignment across modalities. Results showed significantly lower cross-modal alignment in children compared to adults, suggesting ongoing developmental changes in the structure of conceptual representations. Additionally, cross-modal alignment was higher for VF than for HHI categories in both age groups, indicating category-specific variations in conceptual organization and its refinement. These findings provide insights into the gradual refinement of the structure of the lexical-conceptual system, extending beyond item-level lexical learning.