Biography

Natalia Arias-Trejo obtained a DPhil in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom after receiving a Master’s in Applied Linguistics at the University of Sussex and a BA in Hispanic Language and Literature at the National Mexican University. She is director of the Psycholinguistics Lab at the Faculty of Psychology at the National Mexican University. Her research focuses on language acquisition in typically developing children, semantic and morphological processing in children with Down syndrome, as well as numerical processing in this population. Recently she started to look at lexical networks in people diagnosed with dementia. Dr Arias-Trejo loves reading, going to the cinema and playing with her daughter.

Websites:
http://laboratoriopsicolinguistica.psicol.unam.mx
https://www.facebook.com/labpsicolinguistica/

1-003 - Lexical Networks in Typical and Atypical Development

Session Type: Invited Address

Integrative Statement

The mental lexicon is organised by a structure of cues that links words together because their referents share semantics aspects, phonological traits, associative relations, among other features. How early is the mental lexicon organised? Under which parameters can we study this organisation? Moreover, do children with a neurodevelopmental syndrome form a structured mental lexicon? A series of empirical studies sheds light onto these questions. We demonstrate that not only under neurodevelopmental conditions, but also those with a genetic syndrome exhibit an effect of a direct relationship between two words. Moreover, the links between words are evidenced in direct relationships as well as through an activated mediated item in typical development. Finally, we raised the issue of whether these semantic networks are preserved with aging.

Sub Unit

• Invited Program

Chair

• Tatiana Yasmeen Hill, University of Virginia

Speaker

• Natalia Arias-Trejo, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM