Test-based age-of-acquisition norms for 44 thousand English word meanings

Abstract

Age of acquisition (AoA) is an important variable in word recognition research. Up to now, nearly all psychology researchers examining the AoA effect have used ratings obtained from adult participants. An alternative basis for determining AoA is directly testing children's knowledge of word meanings at various ages. In educational research, scholars and teachers have tried to establish the grade at which particular words should be taught by examining the ages at which children know various word meanings. Such a list is available from Dale and O'Rourke's (1981) Living Word Vocabulary for nearly 44 thousand meanings coming from over 31 thousand unique word forms and multiword expressions. The present article relates these test-based AoA estimates to lexical decision times as well as to AoA adult ratings, and reports strong correlations between all of the measures. Therefore, test-based estimates of AoA can be used as an alternative measure.

Cognitive influences in language evolution: Psycholinguistic predictors of loan word borrowing

“…This measure was generated by participants making subjective ratings about the age at which they first learned each word, but these subjective measures have been shown to be highly valid when compared to actual acquisition age (Gilhooly & Gilhooly, 1980;Morrison, Chappell, & Ellis, 1997). A recent study has also provided objective test-based measures of age of acquisition for English (Brysbaert & Biemiller, 2017), and these ratings were also analysed to confirm the effect of the subjective age of acquisition measure.…”

Multiplex networks quantify robustness of the mental lexicon to catastrophic concept failures, aphasic degradation and ageing

“…The graceful decline 23 observed in connectivity when attacking words based on their frequency, length, age of acquisition or number of different meanings indicates that the mental lexicon structure includes additional information that is not fully captured by individual psycholinguistic features. This result indicates the importance of investigating the mental lexicon structure not only in terms of individual word features 48 but also in terms of network metrics, including information on how concepts are connected and organised through conceptual associations. Indeed, network attacks were able to dismantle the language kernel 59 represented by the largest viable cluster 44 (LVC) more efficiently than random expectation and psycholinguistic metrics.…”

“…Four psycholinguistic features of words were used in this study: (i) frequency of words in language as computed in SUBTLEX 47 (a dataset including 2.2 billions subtitles), (ii) word length, (iii) mean age of acquisition of a concept in English native speakers 48 and (iv) number of meanings of a word (polysemy score) computed from the dictionary implemented in WordData[] by WolframResearch and based on WordNet 3.0 49 . All these measures were reported as being predictive of a variety of language processing tasks such as lexical identification 3,47,48 , recall 17,47 and confusability 4,47,48 . Based on such evidence, the above psycholinguistic features were used here as indicators for designing targeted attack strategies to the multiplex lexical network of relevance from a cognitive perspective.…”

Adjective forms and functions in British English child-directed speech

“…We ran a further analysis focusing on the relationship between i) age of acquisition (AoA) and syntactic frame, and ii) AoA and pragmatic function to determine how word familiarity interacts with the frames and functions of adjectives in CDS. AoA norms were taken from a large database of test-based AoA norms (Brysbaert & Biemiller, 2017), derived from directly testing children's knowledge of word meanings at various ages (n = 43,992), coded by US school grade, i.e., grades 2 (age 7-8), 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 14 (college sophomore year, age 19-20). No norms were collected lower than grade 2, so all words known to children in grade 2 are coded as 2, even though the words may have been acquired much earlier (Brysbaert, personal communication).…”