Age-of-acquisition, imagery, familiarity and meaningfulness norms for 543 words

Abstract

The age at which words are first learned appears to be more influential in determining the ease of retrieving words from semantic memory than objective frequency, familiarity, imagery, and meaningfulness. To facilitate research on a wider variety of tasks, we present norms for 543 words for age-of-acquisition, imagery, familiarity, and meaningfulness. Most of the words form single-solution anagrams. There are 471 six-letter nouns and 72 five-letter words. Also reported are the means, 80s, and ranges for each dimension and the intercorrelations between dimensions. Intergroup reliabilities ranged from .847 to .982. Recent studies have indicated that the age at which words are first learned is influential in determining the ease of retrieving words from semantic memory. Frequency of usage during childhood was found to predict latency to name category instances more accurately than adult frequency of usage (Loftus & Suppes, 1972). Age-of-acquisition as rated by young adults was found by Carroll and White (1973) to be a more relevant variable than objective frequency in predicting latency to name pictures. Rated age-of-acquisition also predicted the speed and likelihood of solving anagrams more accurately than rated familiarity, objective frequency, imagery, and meaningfulness (Stratton, Jacobus, & Brinley, Note l). The norms reported in this paper provide adult norms on rated age-of-acquisition, rated imagery, rated familiarity, and meaningfulness for 543 words. Two word samples from these norms were used in an earlier study (see Note 1). METHOD Subjects A total of 879 male and female volunteers from introductory psychology classes contributed to the six-letter word norms during the 1973 fall semester and the 1974 spring semester. An additional 204 males and females from the same subject pool contributed to the five-letter norms during the 1974 summer and fall semesters. Different subjects participated in each segment of the study.

Ratings of age of acquisition of 299 words across 25 languages: Is there a cross-linguistic order of words?

“…These scales were mostly used as variants of Likert-type scales (see the descriptions in Table 3) in studies in which norms for other psycholinguistic variables, such as familiarity, imageability, concreteness, meaningfulness, visual complexity, name and image agreement, and subjective frequency were collected in addition to AoA (e.g., Akinina et al, 2014;Alario & Ferrand, 1999;Bakhtiar, Nilipour, & Weekes, 2013;Barca, Burani, & Arduino, 2002;Bird, Franklin, & Howard, 2001;Bonin, Peereman, Malardier, Méot, & Chalard, 2003;Cuetos, Ellis, & Alvarez, 1999;Della Rosa, Catricalà, Vigliocco, & Cappa, 2010;Dimitropoulou, Duñabeitia, Blitsas, & Carreiras, 2009;Ferrand et al, 2008;Gilhooly & Logie, 1980;Liu, Hao, Li, & Shu, 2011;Liu, Shu, & Li, 2007;Manoiloff, Artstein, Canavoso, Fernández, & Segui, 2010;Moreno-Martínez, Montoro, & Rodríguez-Rojo, 2014;Nishimoto, Miyawaki, Ueda, Une, & Takahashi, 2005;Pind, Jónsdóttir, Gissurardóttir, & Jónsson, 2000;Raman, Raman, & Mertan, 2014;Salmon, McMullen, & Filliter, 2010;Shao, Roelofs, & Meyer, 2014;Sirois et al, 2006;Snodgrass & Yuditsky, 1996;Stration, Jacobus, & Brinley, 1975;Tsaparina, Bonin, & Méot, 2011;Vinson, Cormier, Denmark, Schembri, & Vigliocco, 2008). Other scales have sometimes been modified according Table 3 Most popular scales used in the studies on subjective age of acquisition Scale Description Examples of Studies 5-point 1 = 3 years or earlier, 2 = 4 to 6 years, 3 = 7 to 9 years, 4 = 10 to 12 years, 5 = 13 years or later Akinina et al (2014); …”

“…A review of 54 publications revealed that the majority of the subjective AoA studies did not state the exact form of the question at all Alario & Ferrand, 1999;Alonso, Fernandez, & Díez, 2015;Bakhtiar et al, 2013;Barry et al, 2006;Bird et al, 2001;Bonin, Boyer, Méot, Fayol, & Droit, 2004b;Bonin et al, 2003;Bonin, Perret, Méot, Ferrand, & Mermillod, 2008;Cameirão & Vicente, 2010;Cuetos et al, 1999;Cuetos et al, 2012;De Deyne & Storms, 2007;Della Rosa et al, 2010;Dimitropoulou et al, 2009;Johnston, Dent, Humphreys, & Barry, 2010;Lyons et al, 1978;Manoiloff et al, 2010;Marques, Fonseca, Morais, & Pinto, 2007;Moors et al, 2013;Moreno-Martínez et al, 2014;Nishimoto et al, 2005;Nishimoto, Ueda, Miyawaki, Une, & Takahashi, 2012;Raman et al, 2014;Schock, Cortese, Khanna, & Toppi, 2012;Schröder, Gemballa, Ruppin, & Wartenburger, 2011;Sirois et al, 2006;Stration et al, 1975;Tsaparina et al, 2011;Vinson et al, 2008;Walley & Metsala, 1992;Winters, Winter, & Burger, 1978). In the remaining articles, the wording BWhen do you think you learned this word?^is most frequently used (e.g., Auer & Bernstein, 2008;Barca et al, 2002).…”

Aging, Retrograde Amnesia, and the Binding Problem for Phonology and Orthography: A Longitudinal Study of “Hippocampal Amnesic” H.M.

“…The 1997 stimuli were 23 pseudo-words and 52 words which were either MHF (N 26; mean frequency 84 per million in Francis & Kucera, 1982), or LF (N 26; mean frequency 0.92 per million). To ensure that H.M. knew our LF words before his age 26 lesion, we chose LF words from Webster's (1949) New Collegiate Dictionary that had entered English at least 3 years before H.M.'s (1953) lesion, and had a mean age of acquisition of 13 or less in three sources: Stratton, Jacobus, and Brinley (1975), http://www.psy.uwa.edu.au/MCRDataBase/mrc2.htm, and http://allserv.rug.ac.be/$hnaessen/vakgroep/AoA. html.…”

Effects of Solution Word Attributes on Anagram Difficulty: A Regression Analysis

“…However, imagery is correlated with a number of other word characteristics and so the apparent effect of imagery may be due to some correlate, rather than to imagery itself. The word rating studies of Paivio et al (1968), Stratton, Jacobus and Brinley (1975) and Gilhooly and Hay (1977) indicate that concreteness, associative meaningfulness, familiarity, objective frequency and age-of-acquisition are significantly correlated with word imagery (and with each other). Of these variables, meaningfulness and frequency were controlled by Dewing and Hetherington (1974) and Stratton, Jacobus and Leonard (1975), but the remainder were not.…”