Studies on lexical development in young children often suggest that the organization of the early lexicon may vary with age and increasing vocabulary size. In the current study, we explicitly examined this suggestion in further detail using a longitudinal study of the development of phonological and semantic priming effects in the same group of toddlers at three different ages. In particular, our longitudinal design allows us to disentangle effects of increasing age and vocabulary size on priming and the extent to which vocabulary size may predict later priming effects. We tested phonological and semantic priming effects in monolingual German infants at 18, 21, and 24 months of age. We used the intermodal preferential looking paradigm combined with eye tracking to measure the influence of phonologically and semantic related/unrelated primes on target recognition. We found that phonological priming effects were predicted by participants’ current vocabulary size even after controlling for participants’ age and participants’ early vocabulary size. Semantic priming effects were, in contrast, not predicted by vocabulary size. Finally, we also found a relationship between early phonological priming effects and later semantic priming effects as well as between early semantic priming effects and later phonological priming effects, potentially suggesting (limited) consistency in lexical structure across development. Taken together, these results highlight the important role of vocabulary size in the development of priming effects in early childhood.

对幼儿词汇发展的研究通常表明，早期词汇的组织可能会随着年龄和词汇量的增加而变化。在目前的研究中，我们使用对三个不同年龄的同一组幼儿的语音和语义启动效应发展的纵向研究，进一步详细地研究了这一建议。特别是，我们的纵向设计使我们能够解开年龄和词汇量增加对启动的影响，以及词汇量可以预测以后启动效应的程度。我们在 18、21 和 24 个月大的单语德国婴儿中测试了语音和语义启动效应。我们使用多模态优先观察范式结合眼动追踪来测量语音和语义相关/不相关素数对目标识别的影响。我们发现，即使在控制了参与者的年龄和参与者的早期词汇量之后，语音启动效应仍可以通过参与者当前的词汇量来预测。相比之下，语义启动效应不是由词汇量预测的。最后，我们还发现了早期语音启动效应和后期语义启动效应之间以及早期语义启动效应和后期语音启动效应之间的关系，这可能表明整个发展过程中词汇结构的（有限）一致性。综合起来，