Italian Age of Acquisition Norms for a Large Set of Words (ItAoA)

Abstract

Age of acquisition (AoA) is an important psycholinguistic variable that affects the performance of healthy individuals and patients in a large variety of cognitive tasks. For this reason, it becomes more and more compelling to collect new AoA norms for a large set of stimuli in order to allow better control and manipulation of AoA in future research. An important motivation of the present study is to extend previous Italian norms by collecting AoA ratings for a much larger range of Italian words for which concreteness and semantic-affective norms are now available thus ensuring greater coverage of words varying along these dimensions. In the present study, we collected AoA ratings for 1,957 Italian content words (adjectives, nouns, and verbs), by asking healthy adult participants to estimate the age at which they thought they had learned the word in a Web survey procedure. First, we found high split-half correlation within our sample, suggesting strong internal reliability. Second, our data indicate that the ratings collected in this study are as valid and reliable as those collected in previous studies for Italian across different age populations (adult and children) and other languages. Finally, we analyzed the relation between AoA ratings and other lexical-semantic variables (e.g., word frequency, imageability, valence, arousal) and showed that these correlations were generally consistent with the correlations reported in other normative studies for Italian and other languages. Therefore, our new AoA norms are a valuable source of information for future research in the Italian language. The full database is available at the Open Science Framework (osf.io/3trg2).

Augmented Modality Exclusivity Norms for Concrete and Abstract Italian Property Words

“…Therefore, we found only a limited number of shared words to test our metrics. Yet, correlations were all very strong, especially for AoA (r = 0.93 on the 84 words in common with Montefinese et al, 2019) and Fam (r = 0.92 on the 37 words in common with Borelli et al, 2018). The correlation coefficient was slightly weaker for CA, but still solid (r = 0.79 on the 37 words in common with Borelli eta al., 2018).…”

“…The instructions to participants were based on Gernsbacher (1984). For AoA, participants were asked for the age at which they think they learnt a word (Carroll & White, 1973), similarly to previous studies (Ghyselinck et al, 2000;Kuperman et al, 2012;Montefinese et al, 2019). Because some previous research on AoA used age bands rather than continuous estimates (e.g., Barca et al, 2002), numeric values were converted into 7-point scale values.…”

Augmented Modality Exclusivity Norms for Concrete and Abstract Italian Property Words

“…Therefore, we found only a limited number of shared words to test our metrics. Yet, correlations were all very strong, especially for AoA (r = 0.93 on the 84 words in common with Montefinese et al, 2019) and Fam (r = 0.92 on the 37 words in common with Borelli et al, 2018). The correlation coefficient was slightly weaker for CA, but still solid (r = 0.79 on the 37 words in common with Borelli eta al., 2018).…”

“…The instructions to participants were based on Gernsbacher (1984). For AoA, participants were asked for the age at which they think they learnt a word (Carroll & White, 1973), similarly to previous studies (Ghyselinck et al, 2000; Kuperman et al, 2012; Montefinese et al, 2019). Because some previous research on AoA used age bands rather than continuous estimates (e.g., Barca et al, 2002), numeric values were converted into 7-point scale values.…”

Age of acquisition of 299 words in seven languages: American English, Czech, Gaelic, Lebanese Arabic, Malay, Persian and Western Armenian

“…The list of languages studied has been reviewed in detail [1] and includes such languages as Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. Recently new subjective estimations of AoA have been published for Arabic [97], German [47], Italian [98], Polish [48], Spanish [99,100] and Turkish [101] words. Though objective AoA ratings are, by definition, more valid than subjective estimations, they are much more difficult to obtain, as collection of objective AoA data involves studies of huge samples of children [1,18,26,27,40,55,56].…”