The effect of age of acquisition: Partly frequency related, partly frequency independent
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Abstract A review of multitask investigations on the locus of the age-of-acquisition (AoA) effect in the English, Dutch, and French languages reveals two main findings. First, for most tasks there is near perfect correlation between the magnitude of the AoA effect and the magnitude of the frequency effect, even though the stimuli were selected so that both variables were orthogonal. This frequency-related AoA effect is as large as the frequency effect, despite the fact that the range of AoA values is more restricted than the range of frequency values. Second, a frequency-independent AoA effect is observed in object naming and word associate generation. Different explanations of the frequency-related and the frequency-independent AoA effects are reviewed and evaluated. Notes 1β-values or standardized regression coefficients are obtained when the regression analysis is done on the z-values of the dependent and the independent variables. In this way, the values are not influenced by differences in the variance of the independent variables (see Aron & Aron, Citation2003, pp. 114–124, for a good explanation). 2Notice that this exactly may be what the tachistoscopic presentation of Moore et al. induced: A need to covertly name the briefly presented stimulus, so that it could be kept in short-term memory. 3Interestingly, Levelt and colleagues never refer to their stimuli as polysemous words. They always refer to them as homophones and give examples of English heterographic homophones when they describe their manipulation (e.g., they say the words were of the type wee–we, moor–more, whereas in reality their stimuli were of the type bank, which can be translated in two different ways in Dutch, depending on whether it refers to a river or to money).Keywords:
Age of Acquisition
Homophone
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A. Caramazza, A. Costa, M. Miozzo, and Y. Bi (2001) reported a series of experiments showing that naming latencies for homophones are determined by specific-word frequency (e.g., frequency of nun) and not homophone frequency (frequency of nun none). J. D. Jescheniak, A. S. Meyer, and W. J. M. Levelt (2003) have challenged these studies on a variety of grounds. Here we argue that these criticisms are not well founded and try to clarify the theoretical issues that can be meaningfully addressed by considering the effects of frequency on homophone production. We conclude that the evidence from homophone production cannot be considered to provide support to 2-layer theories of the lexical system.
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The aim of this study was to address the effect of objective age of acquisition (AoA) on picture-naming latencies when different measures of frequency (cumulative and adult word frequency) and frequency trajectory are taken into account. A total of 80 Spanish participants named a set of 178 pictures. Several multiple regression analyses assessed the influence of AoA, word frequency, frequency trajectory, object familiarity, name agreement, image agreement, image variability, name length, and orthographic neighbourhood density on naming times. The results revealed that AoA is the main predictor of picture-naming times. Cumulative frequency and adult word frequency (written or spoken) appeared as important factors in picture naming, but frequency trajectory and object familiarity did not. Other significant variables were image agreement, image variability, and neighbourhood density. These results (a) provide additional evidence of the predictive power of AoA in naming times independent of word-frequency and (b) suggest that image variability and neighbourhood density should also be taken into account in models of lexical production.
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Megastudies with processing efficiency measures for thousands of words allow researchers to assess the quality of the word features they are using. In this article, we analyse reading aloud and lexical decision reaction times and accuracy rates for 2,336 words to assess the influence of subjective frequency and age of acquisition on performance. Specifically, we compare newly presented word frequency measures with the existing frequency norms of Kucera and Francis (1967), HAL (Burgess & Livesay, 1998), Brysbaert and New (2009), and Zeno, Ivens, Millard, and Duvvuri (1995). We show that the use of the Kucera and Francis word frequency measure accounts for much less variance than the other word frequencies, which leaves more variance to be "explained" by familiarity ratings and age-of-acquisition ratings. We argue that subjective frequency ratings are no longer needed if researchers have good objective word frequency counts. The effect of age of acquisition remains significant and has an effect size that is of practical relevance, although it is substantially smaller than that of the first phoneme in naming and the objective word frequency in lexical decision. Thus, our results suggest that models of word processing need to utilize these recently developed frequency estimates during training or setting baseline activation levels in the lexicon.
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The present study investigates the so-called frequency inheritance effect in word production. According to some earlier studies (e.g. Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994), retrieval of a low-frequency homophone benefits from its high-frequency homophone twin, and more specifically word-retrieval RT is determined by the frequency of the phonological form of the word (sum of homophone frequencies) rather than the frequency of the specific word. This result, however, has been challenged by later studies (e.g. Caramazza et al., 2001) and one possible resolution is that languages differ in the extent to which the inheritance effect occurs. Two experiments are reported to test whether the frequency inheritance effect depends on the target language, namely, if a language such as Korean with relatively many homophones tend not to show frequency inheritance, which is compared with the language with fewer homophones such as Dutch and German (Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994; Jescheniak et al., 2003). Experiment 1 was picture naming, and Experiment 2 used an English-to-Korean translation task. In both experiments, the homophones were actually slower than the low-frequency controls, suggesting that there was no evidence for the inheritance effect. These results imply that the issue of whether specific word or homophone frequency determines production can be properly assessed by taking into account the language-specific nature of the lexicon such as the percentage of the homophone words in that language.
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The role of word frequency in lexical access during the production of homophones remains unresolved. In the current study, we address whether specific-word (the frequency of occurrence of the word “ nun”) or homophone frequency (the summed frequency of words with the pronunciation /nλn/) determines the production latencies of homophones. In Experiments 1a, 2a, and 3a, participants named pictures of high-frequency (e.g., “ banco”–a bank: financial institution) and low-frequency (e.g., “ banco”–park bench) Spanish (Experiments 1a and 2a) or French (Experiment 3a) homophones and control pictures of nonhomophone words matched in frequency with each of the two uses of the homophones. The naming latencies for low-frequency homophones were longer than those for high-frequency homophones. Furthermore, the naming latencies for homophones were indistinguishable from those for nonhomophone controls matched in specific-word frequency. In Experiments 1b, 2b, and 3b, the participants performed either object decision or picture–word matching tasks with the stimuli used in the corresponding Experiments 1a, 2a, and 3a. There were no reliable differences between high- and low-frequency homophones. The findings support the hypothesis that specific-word and not homophone frequency determines lexical access in speech production.
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Current models of word production offer different accounts of the representation of homophones in the lexicon. The investigation of how the homophone status of a word affects lexical access can be used to test theories of lexical processing. In this study, homophones appeared as word distractors superimposed on pictures that participants named orally. The authors varied distractor frequency, a variable that has been shown to modulate the interference that distractors produce on picture naming. The results of 3 experiments converged in showing that words interfered in proportion to their individual frequency in the language, even if they have high-frequency homophone mates. This effect of specific-word frequency is compatible with models that assume (a) distinct lexical representations for the individual homophones and (b) that access to such representations is modulated by frequency. The authors discuss the extent to which current models of word production satisfy these constraints.
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