When and how do infants develop a semantic system of words that are related to each other?We investigated word–word associations in early lexical development using an adaptation of theinter-modal preferential looking task where word pairs (as opposed to single target words) wereused to direct infants' attention towards a target picture. Two words (prime and target) were pre-sented in quick succession after which infants were presented with a picture pair (target anddistracter). Prime–target word pairs were either semantically and associatively related or unrelated;the targets were either named or unnamed. Experiment 1 demonstrated a lexical–semantic primingeffect for 21-month olds but not for 18-month olds: unrelated prime words interfered with linguistictarget identification for 21-month olds. Follow-up experiments confirmed the interfering effects ofunrelated prime words and identified the existence of repetition priming effects as young as18 months of age. The results of these experiments indicate that infants have begun to developsemantic–associative links between lexical items as early as 21 months of age.
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