Comparing child word associations to adult associative norms: Evidence for child-specific associations with a strong priming effect in 3-year-olds

Investigating how infants first establish relationships between words is a necessary step towards understanding how an interconnected network of semantic relationships develops in the adult lexical-semantic system. Stimuli selection for these child studies is critical since words must be both familiar and highly imageable. However, there has been a reliance on adult word association norms to inform stimuli selection in English infant studies to date, as no resource currently exists for child-specific word associations. We present three experiments that explore the strength of word–word relationships in 3-year-olds. Experiment 1 collected children’s word associations (WA) ( N = 150; female = 84, L1 = British English) and compared them to adult associative norms (Moss & Older, 1996; Nelson et al., 2004 ( Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers , 36(3), 402–407)). Experiment 2 replicated WAs from Experiment 1 in an online adaptation of the task ( N = 24: 13 female, L1 = British English). Both experiments indicated a high proportion of child-specific WAs not represented in adult norms (Moss & Older, 1996; Nelson et al., 2004 ( Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers , 36(3), 402–407)). Experiment 3 tested noun–noun WAs from these responses in an online semantic priming study ( N = 40: 19 female, L1 = British English) and found that association type modulated priming ( F (2.57, 100.1) = 13.13, p <. 0001, generalized η 2 = .19). This research presents a resource of child-specific imageable noun–noun word pair stimuli suitable for testing young children in word recognition and semantic priming studies.