The development of semantic priming effect in childhood: an event-related potential study.

To investigate the development of semantic priming effect in school children, we examined the event-related potentials in 120 children from 7 to 12 years when they were instructed to perform a lexical decision task. The well-known N400 component and a late positive component showed parabolic changes with the age growing. In addition, the lateralization of the brain potentials indicated the early stage in elementary school was the curial time for development of linguistic neural networks. This finding first revealed the detailed changes of semantic priming effect in childhood.