Age-of-acquisition effects in visual word recognition: evidence from expert vocabularies

Three experiments assessed the contributions of age-of-acquisition (AoA) and frequency to visual word recognition. Three databases were created from electronic journals in chemistry, psychology and geology in order to identify technical words that are extremely frequent in each discipline but acquired late in life. In Experiment 1, psychologists and chemists showed an advantage in lexical decision for late-acquired/high-frequency words (e.g. a psychologist responding to cognition) over late-acquired/low-frequency words (e.g. a chemist responding to cognition), revealing a frequency effect when words are perfectly matched. However, contrary to theories that exclude AoA as a factor, performance was similar for the late-acquired/high-frequency and early-acquired/low-frequency words (e.g. dragon) even though their cumulative frequencies differed by more than an order of magnitude. This last finding was replicated with geologists using geology words matched with early-acquired words in terms of concreteness (Experiment 2). Most interestingly, Experiment 3 yielded the same pattern of results in naming while controlling for imageability, a finding that is particularly problematic for parallel distributed processing models of reading.

[1]  Mark S. Seidenberg,et al.  Age of Acquisition Effects in Word Reading and Other Tasks , 2002 .

[2]  Michael B. Lewis,et al.  Age of acquisition in face categorisation: is there an instance-based account? , 1999, Cognition.

[3]  S. Gerhand,et al.  Age of acquisition, word frequency, and the role of phonology in the lexical decision task , 1999, Memory & cognition.

[4]  A W Ellis,et al.  Contrasting effects of age of acquisition and word frequency on auditory and visual lexical decision , 1998, Memory & cognition.

[5]  Rudolph W. Schulz,et al.  Parameters of abstraction, meaningfulness, and pronunciability for 329 nouns , 1966 .

[6]  J. Carroll,et al.  Age-of-acquisition norms for 220 picturable nouns , 1973 .

[7]  Kenneth Gilhooly,et al.  Age-of-acquisition effects in lexical and episodic memory tasks , 1979 .

[8]  Catriona M. Morrison,et al.  Age of acquisition, not word frequency, affects object naming, not object recognition , 1992, Memory & cognition.

[9]  Kenneth Gilhooly,et al.  Word age-of-acquisition and residence time in lexical memory as factors in word naming , 1984 .

[10]  Colin J. Davis,et al.  The self-organising lexical acquisition and recognition (SOLAR) model of visual word recognition. , 2001 .

[11]  A. Paivio,et al.  Concreteness, imagery, and meaningfulness values for 925 nouns. , 1968, Journal of experimental psychology.

[12]  Andrew W. Ellis,et al.  Age of acquisition and the completeness of phonological representations , 2002 .

[13]  C. Davis.  N-Watch: A program for deriving neighborhood size and other psycholinguistic statistics , 2005, Behavior research methods.

[14]  Michael A. Lewis.  Discussion: Are age-of-acquisition effects cumulative-frequency effects in disguise? A reply to Moore, Valentine and Turner (1999) , 1999 .

[15]  Catriona M. Morrison,et al.  Real age-of-acquisition effects in lexical retrieval. , 1998, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[16]  S. Gerhand,et al.  Word frequency effects in oral reading are not merely age-of-acquisition effects in disguise. , 1998 .

[17]  Max Coltheart,et al.  Access to the internal lexicon , 1977 .

[18]  Christopher Barry,et al.  Age-of-acquisition and frequency effects in speeded word naming , 1999, Cognition.

[19]  Andrew W. Ellis,et al.  ROLES OF WORD FREQUENCY AND AGE OF ACQUISITION IN WORD NAMING AND LEXICAL DECISION , 1995 .

[20]  Age-of-acquisition and cumulative frequency have independent effects. , 1999, Cognition.

[21]  M. L. Lambon Ralph,et al.  Age of acquisition effects in adult lexical processing reflect loss of plasticity in maturing systems: insights from connectionist networks. , 2000, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[22]  M. Vitkovitch,et al.  Sources of Disagreement in Object Naming , 1995 .

[23]  James L. McClelland,et al.  An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: I. An account of basic findings. , 1981 .

[24]  H. Kucera,et al.  Computational analysis of present-day American English , 1967 .

[25]  E. Rothkopf,et al.  The word frequency effect in lexical decision: Finding a frequency-based component , 1987, Memory & cognition.

[26]  Catriona M. Morrison,et al.  Real age of acquisition effects in word naming and lexical decision. , 2000, British journal of psychology.

[27]  Christopher T. Kello,et al.  Runword: An IBM-PC software package for the collection and acoustic analysis of speeded naming responses , 1998 .

[28]  Bradley conducld,et al.  THE WORD FREQUENCY EFFECT AND LEXICAL ACCESS* , 2002 .

[29]  R. H. Baayen,et al.  The CELEX Lexical Database (CD-ROM) , 1996 .

[30]  Judith F. Kroll,et al.  Lexical access for concrete and abstract words. , 1986 .

[31]  John Morton,et al.  Facilitation in Word Recognition: Experiments Causing Change in the Logogen Model , 1979 .

[32]  Gordon D. A. Brown,et al.  First in, first out: Word learning age and spoken word frequency as predictors of word familiarity and word naming latency , 1987, Memory & cognition.

[33]  Kenneth I Forster,et al.  DMDX: A Windows display program with millisecond accuracy , 2003, Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers : a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.