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Developmental Changes in Semantic and Phonological Representations During Speech Production: An EEG RSA Study
Poster Session C, Thursday, October 1, 10:45 am - 12:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
Chen Feng1, Jiaran Dong1, Qingya Zhang1; 1State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Science and Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
The development of semantic and phonological processing during speech production remains incompletely understood, particularly with respect to how neural representations change across childhood and adolescence. The present study investigated the developmental trajectories of semantic and phonological processing in picture naming using electroencephalography (EEG) and representational similarity analysis (RSA). EEG data were collected from children and adolescents aged 5 to 18 years while they performed picture naming tasks designed to probe semantic and phonological processing. To characterize the neural representational dynamics underlying speech production, RSA was applied to examine differences in EEG activity similarity between within-category and between-category stimulus pairs. This approach enabled us to quantify the distinctiveness and temporal evolution of semantic and phonological representations across development. Specifically, we compared neural similarity patterns elicited by semantically or phonologically related items, focusing on within-category versus between-category effects as indices of representational organization during speech production. Developmental changes were assessed by examining the temporal characteristics and magnitude of these representational effects across age. Preliminary findings revealed age-related shifts in the timing of both semantic and phonological processing. As age increased, the temporal windows associated with semantic and phonological representational effects gradually emerged earlier, suggesting increasing efficiency and automatization of lexical retrieval processes during development. In the semantic condition, stronger within-category versus between-category effects were observed during earlier developmental stages, indicating greater representational sensitivity to semantic category structure in younger children. This pattern may reflect a developmental reliance on broad semantic category organization during lexical access. In contrast, phonological within-category versus between-category effects were primarily observed in adolescents aged 13–18 years, suggesting a later developmental refinement of phonological representations and increasing neural differentiation of phonological information during speech production. Together, these findings suggest distinct developmental trajectories of semantic and phonological processing during picture naming, with age-related changes in the timing and neural representations of semantics and phonology.
Topic Areas: Language Production, Language Development/Acquisition