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 andbottom-up pathways pass information between different levels of representation. In this study,we investigated how these interactive mechanisms develop by asking whether interactiveprocessing arises early in life or emerges later, with experience or as the brain matures. In avisual world eye-tracking study, we tested whether four and five year-old children showevidence of top-down interactivity during language comprehension. We found that youngchildren, like adults, can use top-down cues from the sentence context to constrain processing ofthe bottom-up language input during spoken word recognition, allowing them to avoid activatingword 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 phonologicalrepresentations of predictable words before they appeared in the input. These findings illustratethat the pathways necessary for interactive processing are robust and active by early childhood,suggesting that the mechanisms of interactive processing are intrinsic and fundamental propertiesof the mind’s architecture.