A) activation as a function of time in the TRACE model (McClelland & Elman, 1986) as a target word (here, beaker) is heard. Words are differentially active depending on match to the input. Activations generated with TRACE (Strauss et al., 2007). B) Competition dynamics can be characterized in humans using the Visual World Paradigm (Allopenna et al., 1998; Salverda et al., 2003) in which eye movements to pictures representing various lexical candidates are monitored while the subject hears a target word (here, wizard) Shown is the likelihood of fixating each object over time after hearing wizard for 40 typical adolescents (Clayards et al., 2008; McMurray et al., 2010).