Long-term auditory word priming in preschoolers: Implicit memory support for language acquisition

Three experiments explored long-term auditory word priming in young preschoolers. Children 2.5 and 3 years old and adults more accurately identified low-pass-filtered words that had been presented once in an initial study phase (Experiment 1) than words that had not been presented. The auditory priming effect showed no significant change from 2.5 years of age to college age. An effect of similar magnitude was also found in 2-year-olds (Experiment 2). Similar to findings with adults, auditory word priming in 3-year-olds did not significantly increase following a semantic encoding task, although explicit recognition memory improved under semantic study conditions (Experiment 3). The similar auditory word priming in preschoolers and adults suggests that the same learning mechanisms are at work in both groups. We argue that the powerful perceptual Yearning mechanism underlying auditory word priming has just the right properties to play a crucial role in the development of an auditory lexicon. (C) 1998 Academic Press.