Age of acquisition and imageability ratings for a large set of words, including verbs and function words

Abstract

Age of acquisition and imageability ratings were collected for 2,645 words, including 892 verbs and 213 function words. Words that were ambiguous as to grammatical category were disambiguated: Verbs were shown in their infinitival form, and nouns (where appropriate) were preceded by the indefinite article (such as to crack and a crack). Subjects were speakers of British English selected from a wide age range, so that differences in the responses across age groups could be compared. Within the subset of early acquired noun/verb homonyms, the verb forms were rated as later acquired than the nouns, and the verb homonyms of high-imageability nouns were rated as significantly less imageable than their noun counterparts. A small number of words received significantly earlier or later age of acquisition ratings when the 20-40 years and 50-80 years age groups were compared. These tend to comprise words that have come to be used more frequently in recent years (either through technological advances or social change), or those that have fallen out of common usage. Regression analyses showed that although word length, familiarity, and concreteness make independent contributions to the age of acquisition measure, frequency and imageability are the most important predictors of rated age of acquisition.

A Unified Theory of Word Learning: Putting Verb Acquisition in Context

“…Because, on average, nouns and especially object nouns of the sort studied in our literature, fall at the more concrete end of the SICI continuum than do verbs. These more imageable words are learned earlier than less imageable words, regardless of syntactic class (Bird, Franklin, & Howard, 2001). Preliminary data in our labs (Lannon et al, in preparation) suggests that adult ratings of imageability correlate with age of acquisition on standardized material checklists, like the MacArthur Communicative Inventory (Fenson et al, 1994) irrespective of word class in both English and Chinese.…”

“…Bird et al (2001) found that regardless of grammatical category (including verbs and function words), age of acquisition is significantly correlated with imageability. Further, imageability can predict the ease with which one can determine the referent of a novel word in context.…”

“…Thus, the word cup will be easier to learn in the presence of a cup than will more perceptually abstract noun patriot. Indeed, Bird et al (2001), Gillette et al (1999) and our own work (Lannon et al, in preparation) show that words appearing in the earliest vocabularies are the most perceptually accessible across both verbs and nouns and are those that more readily generate mental images.…”

“…Imageability ratings generally occur on a 7-point scale from "not imageable at all" (1) to "extremely imageable" (7); (Bird et al, 2001;Gillette et al, 1999). Ratings of imageability would ordinarily however, be highly correlated with ratings of concreteness (Paivio et al, 1968).…”

Some neurophysiological constraints on models of word naming

“…The sets were also matched on imageability. Imageability ratings were taken from the MRC lexical database (Wilson, 1988) (www.psy.uwa.edu.au/mrcdatabasewa _ mrc.htm) and from norms published by Bird et al (2001) and Cortese and Fugett (2004). Imageability ratings for the study items ranged from 140 to 659 (mean = 458, SD = 125) and were uncorrelated with letter length, phoneme length, mean positional bigram frequency, orthographic neighborhood count, or word frequency.…”