Evidence for top-down constraints and form-based prediction in 4-5 year-olds' lexical processing

Interactive processing is a central feature of human cognition, whereby top-down and bottom-up pathways pass information between different levels of representation. In this study, we investigated how these interactive mechanisms develop by asking whether interactive processing arises early in life or emerges later, with experience or as the brain matures. In a visual world eye-tracking study, we tested whether four and five year-old children show evidence of top-down interactivity during language comprehension. We found that young children, like adults, can use top-down cues from the sentence context to constrain processing of the bottom-up language input during spoken word recognition, allowing them to avoid activating word candidates that initially match the input but are semantically incongruent with the context. Furthermore, we found that the children used top-down cues to pre-activate the phonological representations of predictable words before they appeared in the input. These findings illustrate that the pathways necessary for interactive processing are robust and active by early childhood, suggesting that the mechanisms of interactive processing are intrinsic and fundamental properties of the mind's architecture.