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In many tasks the effects of frequency and age of acquisition (AoA) on reaction latencies are similar in size. However, in picture naming the AoA-effect is often significantly larger than expected on the basis of the frequency-effect. Previous explanations of this frequency-independent AoA-effect have attributed it to the organisation of the semantic system or to the way phonological word forms are stored in the mental lexicon. Using a semantic blocking paradigm, we show that semantic context effects on naming latencies are more pronounced for late-acquired than for early-acquired words. This interaction between AoA and naming context is likely to arise during lexical-semantic encoding, which we put forward as the locus for the frequency-independent AoA-effect. q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Keywords: Age-of-acquisition; Picture naming; Lexical retrieval; Semantic context Word processing times depend not only on the frequency with which the words occur in texts, but also on the age at which they were acquired (age-of-acquisition, AoA). Words that were acquired early in life are responded to faster than late-acquired words of the same frequency (Morrison & Ellis, 1995). In word naming and lexical decision, the effects 0022-2860/$ -see front matter q

They addressed the issue using the semantic Simon paradigm. In this paradigm, participants are instructed to decide whether a stimulus word is printed in uppercase or lowercase letters. However, they have to respond with a verbal label ("living" or "nonliving") that is either congruent with the meaning of the word (e.g., saying "living" to the stimulus DOG) or incongruent (e.g., saying "nonliving" to the stimulus dog). Results showed a significant congruency effect that was stronger for early-acquired words than for late-acquired words. The authors conclude that the age of acquisition is an important variable in the activation of the meaning of visually presented words.

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