Spoken-word recognition in 2-year-olds: The tug of war between phonological and semantic activation

•We examined the mental processes involved in spoken-word recognition in toddlers.•The adult four-picture Visual World Paradigm was adapted for toddlers.•Toddlers attended to a phonological match sooner than a semantic (taxonomic or thematic) match.•Fixations to a phonological match were positively correlated with vocabulary size.•Language biases toddlers’ attention to phonologically- and semantically-relevant visual information.