Age and age of acquisition: An evaluation of the cumulative frequency hypothesis

An important determinant of picture and word naming speed is the age at which the names were learned (age of acquisition). Two related interpretations of these effects are that they reflect differences between words in their cumulative frequency of use, or that they reflect differences in the amount of time early and lateacquired words have spent in lexical memory. Both theories predict that differences between early and late-acquired words will be less apparent in older than younger adults. Two experiments are reported in which younger and older adults read words varying in age of acquisition or frequency, or named objects varying in age of acquisition. There was an observed effect of word frequency only for young adults' word naming. In contrast, strong age of acquisition effects were found for both the young and the old participants. The implications of these results for theories of how age of acquisition might affect lexical processing are discussed.

[1]  R. Logie,et al.  Age-of-acquisition, imagery, concreteness, familiarity, and ambiguity measures for 1,944 words , 1980 .

[2]  Kenneth Gilhooly,et al.  Word age-of-acquisition effects: a review , 1981 .

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

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

[5]  J. Cerella,et al.  Lexical Access and Age. , 1984 .

[6]  A. Roelofs,et al.  A spreading-activation theory of lemma retrieval in speaking , 1992, Cognition.

[7]  N. C. Waugh,et al.  Age-related differences in naming latency. , 1977, The American journal of psychology.

[8]  D. Balota,et al.  A dissociation of frequency and regularity effects in pronunciation performance across young adults, older adults, and individuals with senile dementia of the Alzheimer type. , 1993 .

[9]  N. L. Bowles,et al.  The effect of age on speed of lexical access. , 1981, Experimental aging research.

[10]  D. Howard.  The effects of aging and degree of association on the semantic priming of lexical decisions. , 1983, Experimental aging research.

[11]  Kenneth Gilhooly,et al.  The validity of age-of-acquisition ratings , 1980 .

[12]  A Wingfield,et al.  Response Latencies in Naming Objects , 1965, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology.

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

[14]  H. Goodglass,et al.  Lexical Retrieval in Healthy Aging , 1985, Cortex.

[15]  Morrison Cm.  The loci and roles of word age of acquisition and word frequency in lexical processing. , 1993 .

[16]  Gerard Kempen,et al.  The lexicalization process in sentence production and naming: indirect election of words , 1983, Cognition.

[17]  R. Lachman.  Uncertainty effects on time to access the internal lexicon. , 1973 .

[18]  Michael C. Doyle,et al.  Effects of frequency on visual word recognition tasks: where are they? , 1989, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

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

[20]  David A. Balota,et al.  Lexical , Sublexical , and Implicit Memory Processes in Healthy Young and Healthy Older Adults and in Individuals With Dementia of the Alzheimer Type , 2004 .

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

[22]  S. Hains,et al.  Individual differences in word recognition latency , 1979 .

[23]  T. Salthouse.  A Theory of Cognitive Aging , 1985 .

[24]  Michael B. Lewis,et al.  Re-evaluating age-of-acquisition effects: are they simply cumulative-frequency effects? , 2001, Cognition.

[25]  E. Maylor.  Effects of aging on the retrieval of common and proper names , 1995 .

[26]  R. Logie,et al.  Word age-of-acquisition and visual recognition thresholds , 1981 .

[27]  J. Myerson,et al.  The information-loss model: a mathematical theory of age-related cognitive slowing. , 1990, Psychological review.

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

[29]  S. D. Lima,et al.  How general is general slowing? Evidence from the lexical domain. , 1991, Psychology and aging.

[30]  D. Balota,et al.  Age-related differences in lexical access, spreading activation, and simple pronunciation. , 1988, Psychology and aging.

[31]  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.

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

[33]  R. Nebes,et al.  Automatic and attentional mechanisms of semantic priming in Alzheimer's disease. , 1989, Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology.

[34]  D. Madden.  Adult age differences in visual word recognition: semantic encoding and episodic retention. , 1986, Experimental aging research.

[35]  R. Nebes,et al.  Use of semantic context by patients with Alzheimer's disease. , 1986, Psychology and aging.

[36]  W. Levelt.  Speaking: From Intention to Articulation , 1990 .

[37]  D. Madden,et al.  Visual word encoding and the effect of adult age and word frequency , 1995 .

[38]  K. Forster,et al.  Lexical Access and Naming Time. , 1973 .

[39]  G. Cohen,et al.  Memory for proper names: age differences in retrieval , 1986 .

[40]  Donald G. MacKay,et al.  On the tip of the tongue: What causes word finding failures in young and older adults? , 1991 .

[41]  W. Levelt,et al.  Word frequency effects in speech production: Retrieval of syntactic information and of phonological form , 1994 .

[42]  E. Crook,et al.  Word Recognition , 2010 .

[43]  Andrew W. Ellis,et al.  Age of Acquisition Norms for a Large Set of Object Names and Their Relation to Adult Estimates and Other Variables , 1997 .

[44]  J. Birren,et al.  Aging and speed of behavior: possible consequences for psychological functioning. , 1995, Annual review of psychology.

[45]  D J Madden,et al.  Influence of age and processing stage on visual word recognition. , 1993, Psychology and aging.

[46]  D. Balota,et al.  Factors influencing word naming in younger and older adults. , 2000, Psychology and aging.

[47]  Christopher Barry,et al.  Naming the Snodgrass and Vanderwart Pictures: Effects of Age of Acquisition, Frequency, and Name Agreement , 1997 .

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

[49]  Glyn W. Humphreys,et al.  Cascade processes in picture identification , 1988 .

[50]  Mark S. Seidenberg,et al.  Semantic effects in single-word naming. , 1995, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[51]  D. B. Mitchell,et al.  How many memory systems? Evidence from aging. , 1989, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

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

[53]  F. Cirrin.  Lexical access in children and adults. , 1983 .

[54]  David C. Rubin,et al.  51 properties of 125 words: A unit analysis of verbal behavior , 1980 .

[55]  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.

[56]  J. Frederiksen,et al.  Spelling and sound: Approaches to the internal lexicon. , 1976 .

[57]  Joellen T. Hartley,et al.  Language, memory, and aging: Aging and individual differences in memory for written discourse , 1988 .

[58]  L. Winter,et al.  Confidence in age-of-acquisition estimates and its relationship to children’s labeling performance , 1978 .

[59]  J. G. Snodgrass,et al.  A standardized set of 260 pictures: norms for name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. , 1980, Journal of experimental psychology. Human learning and memory.

[60]  William E. Nagy,et al.  Morphological families in the internal lexicon , 1989 .

[61]  B. Ska,et al.  Is there a decline in picture naming with advancing age? , 1994, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[62]  L. Poon,et al.  Speed of retrieval from long-term memory in relation to age, familiarity, and datedness of information. , 1978, Journal of gerontology.

[63]  Roy Lachman,et al.  Language and Cognition: Effects of Stimulus Codability, Name-Word Frequency, and Age of Acquisition on Lexical Reaction Time. , 1974 .

[64]  Kenneth Gilhooly,et al.  Imagery, concreteness, age-of-acquisition, familiarity, and meaningfulness values for 205 five-letter words having single-solution anagrams , 1977 .

[65]  J. Carroll,et al.  Word Frequency and Age of Acquisition as Determiners of Picture-Naming Latency , 1973 .

[66]  Willem J. M. Levelt,et al.  A theory of lexical access in speech production , 1999, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.