Age-of-acquisition norms for a set of 1,749 Portuguese words

Abstract

In 1973, Carroll and White showed that words acquired earlier in life tend to be processed faster and more accurately than later acquired words in a picture naming task. From that moment on, age of acquisition (AoA) was considered to be a relevant psycholinguistic variable, and several experimental studies have replicated the effect found by Carroll and White in many paradigms (e.g., picture naming-Barry, Holmes & Ellis, 2006;Lambon Ralph & Ehsan, 2006; written-word naming-Brysbaert, Lange, & Van Wijnendaele, 2000;Monaghan & Ellis, 2002a, 2002bMorrison & Ellis, 1995 lexical decision-Gerhand & Barry, 1999;Turner, Valentine, & Ellis, 1998). In fact, AoA seems to be the main variable that influences the speed of lexical processing, and its effect remains even when other variables, such as cumulative frequency, are controlled (Pérez, 2007). Recently, an extensive study conducted by Cortese and Khanna (2007) , and Portuguese (Vicente, 2004;Vicente, Castro, & Walley, 2008). It is also consistent throughout the entire life span, since it has been found in children (D'Amico, Devescovi, & Bates, 2001), young adults, and older subjects (Barry, Johnston, & Wood, 2006). Similarly, early acquired words are the last to deteriorate in neuropsychological disorders such as Alzheimer's disease (Sartori, Lombardi, & Mattiuzzi, 2005) and aphasia (Hirsh & Ellis, 1994). These studies highlight the vital importance of AoA in lexical processing and emphasize the need to control AoA in experimental and neuropsychological studies. For that purpose, researchers need to have access to AoA norms.There are two ways of collecting AoA data: (1) using adult estimates (see, e.g., Bird, Franklin, & Howard, 2001;Marques, Fonseca, Morais, & Pinto, 2007) or (2) analyzing the performance of children in naming tasks (e.g., Chalard, Bonin, Méot, Boyer, & Fayol, 2003). In the first method, adults are asked to estimate the age at which they possibly learned a given word. In the second method, the experimenter presents pictures to children of different age cohorts, and the average AoA is usually calculated when at least 75% of the children can name the picture (Morrison, Chappell, & Ellis, 1997). It has been shown that adult estimates are as valid and reliable as the data collected with children and that the norms provided by the two methods are highly correlated (Ghyselinck, De Moor, & Brysbaert, 2000;Morrison et al., 1997;Pind, Jónsdóttir, Gissurardóttir, & Jónsson, 2000). Moreover, the correlations between the two types of norms are still significant even when other variables, such as familiarity, frequency, and phonological length, are controlled . So, when it is not possible to obtain objective data, adult estimates seem to be a valid and reliable AoA measure.Current lexical databases of AoA norms use both methods. Table 1 summarizes the main AoA norms that have been published since 1997. There is only one published lexical database for Portuguese (Marques et al., 2007). In that database, the authors collected AoA estimates for 834Age-of-acquisit...

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

“…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).…”

The Minho Word Pool: Norms for imageability, concreteness, and subjective frequency for 3,800 Portuguese words

“…Up to now, the few norms available have been the recent AoA norms from the works of Marques and colleagues (Marques, Fonseca, Morais, & Pinto, 2007) and Cameirão and Vicente (2010) for 834 and 1,749 Portuguese words, respectively, but based on different data collection procedures (Marques et al, 2007, collected the AoA ratings using a 7-point scale based on Gilhooly and Logie's, 1980, procedure, whereas Cameirão and Vicente used a 9-point scale following Carroll and White's, 1973, work). Subjective norms for valence, arousal, and dominance were also collected for 1,034 words in the recent adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW; Bradley & Lang, 1999) into European Portuguese (Soares, Comesaña, Pinheiro, Simões, & Frade, 2012).…”

“…It is worth noting that the MWP also integrates words that match those in the abovementioned national (Cameirão & Vicente, 2010;Marques et al, 2007;Soares et al, 2012) and international databases: namely, the Bristol norms of Stadthagen-Gonzalez and Davis (2006)-one of the biggest subjective databases used in research, which provides AoA, imageability, and familiarity norms for 3,394 English words-the recent work of Brysbaert et al (2014), which presents norms of concreteness for 40,000 English lemmas, and the Balota et al (2001) norms, which provide subjective frequency ratings for 2,938 English words. This option allowed us not only to crossvalidate the MWP with its national and international counterparts in which the same and other subjective variables (i.e., familiarity, AoA, valence, arousal, and dominance) are available, but additionally to contribute to a more complete characterization of the Portuguese stimuli typically used in experimental research.…”

Affective prosody in European Portuguese: Perceptual and acoustic characterization of one-word utterances

“…A set of six one-word items for training plus 22 oneword items for the acoustic and perceptual test (i.e., experimental condition) were selected, taking into account criteria for high frequency and age of acquisition equal or inferior to 5 years (Cameirão and Vicente, 2010;Gomes and Castro, 2003; the complete list is in Appendix A). The words consisted of food-related items (e.g., laranja, orange) with different lengths in number of syllables (from 1 to 3).…”