While semantic development has been alleged to proceed slowly, reading instruction begins early in the child's school career. Yet, little research has been addressed toward understanding how beginning readers extract meaning from the printed word. This paper reports two experiments that measured latencies in a picture-word interference task to assess semantic processing. Results suggest that picture-word interference was partly semantically based and that children and adults experienced an equivalent amount of semantic interference. The results are interpreted as indicating that even by the second grade children are sensitive to the meaning of printed words. (Author)