Word-Association Latency in Normal Children During Development and the Relation of Brain Electrical Activity.

Electroencephalograms (EEGs) were recorded in a group of 37 normal boys aged 92-206 months during performance of a word-association task. Ss were instructed to say the first word that came to mind, as quickly as possible, following presentation of each of 18 stimulus words that were familiar to young children. Word-association latency, or the associative reaction time (RT), was analyzed only for trials in which a stimulus word evoked the same response word. Younger children were found to have significantly longer associative RTs than older children, with associative RT decreasing with increasing age according to a reciprocal power-law function. Comparison of this function with similar functions relating simple and disjunctive RT to age, suggested that the longer word-association latencies of children could not be attributed merely to developmental differences in non-verbal processes or processes concerned primarily with speed of responding. Sufficient EEG data for analysis were available for only 5 of the stimulus-response word combinations, and for these data, average EEG period from the left hemisphere was significantly different from (longer than) EEG period from the right hemisphere. Results of a partial-correlation analysis showed that left-hemisphere differences in EEG period between Ss can account, in part, for the relationship between associative RT and age, while righthemisphere differences in EEG period cannot. Although this suggested a hypothesis which ascribes the long word-association latencies of young children to age-associated differences in EEG period of the left hemisphere, evidence was inconclusive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]