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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2024 Jun 6.
Published in final edited form as: Annu Rev Dev Psychol. 2022 Dec;4(1):21–40. doi: 10.1146/annurev-devpsych-120920-042902

Figure 2.

Figure 2

Semantic structure and its links to processing at several levels. (a) Global semantic structure of two 18-month-olds who say the same number of words but show differences in vocabulary structure. Purple areas highlight the differences in local animal category structure. (b) Global and local differences in structure influence processing. At 18 months, word recognition is facilitated by higher (versus lower) density category structure, but this pattern is reversed when considering lexicon-level connectivity. (c, left) Map of types of semantic connections across children’s (normative) first 100 spoken words created from data reported in Peters & Borovsky (2019). Perceptual feature connections dominate early. (c, right) Processing for words with many perceptual connections is facilitated compared with words with fewer perceptual links. Abbreviation: GCC, global clustering coefficient. Panel b adapted from Borovsky & Peters (2019) (CC BY 4.0). Panel c (right) adapted from Peters et al. 2021 (CC BY 4.0).