Age of Acquisition

Age of Acquisition is a psycholinguistic variable referring to the age at which a word is typically learnt. For example, the word 'penguin' is typically learnt at a younger age than the word 'albatros'. Studies in psycholinguistics suggest that age of acquisition has an effect on the speed of reading words.^[1] It is a particularly strong variable in predicting the speed of picture naming.^[2]

Norms

Sets of normative values for age of acquisition for large sets of words have been developed.

Kuperman, Stadthagen-Gonzalez, and Brysbaert ^[3]

Gilhooly and Logie.^[4]

Morrison et al.^[5]

Relation to other variables

It has been disputed whether age of acquisition has an effect on word tasks on its own or by virtue of its covariance with other variables such as word frequency.^[6] Alternatively, it has been suggested that the age of acquisition is related to the fact that an earlier learnt word has been encountered more often.^[7] These issues were partially resolved in an article by Ghyselinck, Lewis and Brysbaert.^[8]

References

1. "Age-of-Acquisition Effects in Word and Picture Identification".
2. "Aphasia and age of acquisition: are early-learned words more resilient?".
3. "Age-of-acquisition ratings for 30 thousand English words". springer.com.
4. "Age-of-acquisition, imagery, concreteness, familiarity, and ambiguity measures for 1,944 words". springer.com.
5. "Age of Acquisition Norms for a Large Set of Object Names and Their Relation to Adult Estimates and Other Variables". tandfonline.com.
6. "Age-of-Acquisition Effects in Word and Picture Identification".
7. "Re-evaluating age-of-acquisition effects: are they simply cumulative-frequency effects?" (PDF).
8. "Age of acquisition and the cumulative-frequency hypothesis: A review of the literature and a new multi-task investigation". Acta Psychologica. 115: 43–67. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2003.11.002.