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Description: The goal of this study was to investigate lexical–semantic processing at an early phase of language development. Adults often communicate with children by using a speech mode called infant-directed speech that typically involves lexical and syntactic modifications such as onomatopoeias (Soderstrom, 2007). Here we asked how and when children start to replace such lexical modifications with conventional linguistic signs, such as common nouns. We recorded event-related brain potentials in two children of two age groups (16 to 20 months and 24 to 30 months) and in an adult control group during the presentation of the four conditions in which either common nouns or onomatopoeias were presented auditorily followed by either a congruent or incongruent image. The younger group of children revealed a N400 effect for onomatopoeic words, while the older children showed a N400 effect only for common nouns. These different N400 effects to onomatopoeic utterances and common nouns across the two age groups suggest that these categories are differently organized in children’s semantic memory and that the acquisition of linguistic abilities affects and modifies semantic processing of different lexical information.