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

Abstract

We present a new set of subjective Age of Acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in seven languages from various language families and cultural settings: American English, Czech, Scottish Gaelic, Lebanese Arabic, Malaysian Malay, Persian, and Western Armenian. The ratings were collected from a total of 173 participants and were highly reliable in each language. We applied the same method of data collection as used in a previous study on 25 languages which allowed us to create a database of fully comparable AoA ratings of 299 words in 32 languages. We found that in the seven languages not included in the previous study, the words are estimated to be acquired at roughly the same age as in the previously reported languages, i.e. mostly between the ages of 1 and 7 years. We also found that the order of word acquisition is moderately to highly correlated across all 32 languages, which extends our previous conclusion that early words are acquired in similar order across a wide range of languages and cultures.

Serial Recall Order and Semantic Features of Category Fluency Words to Study Semantic Memory in Normal Ageing

“…Although these three latter features are devoid of semantic information (i.e., the number of letters and syllables and the number of existing words differing by one grapheme do not convey any semantic content) they do nonetheless show important connections with SM processing. Shorter words, for instance, tend to be acquired earlier in life ( Łuniewska et al, 2019 ) and it is also known that words may activate the semantic information linked to their orthographic neighbourhood ( Forster and Hector, 2002 ). Our findings thus suggest that semantic retrieval in older adults relies on additional lexical properties that are not semantic per se , but are of support in facilitating or expanding processing linked to SM retrieval.…”

Majority language vocabulary and nonword repetition skills in children attending minority language immersion education

“…Knowing a word also entails knowing the word class it belongs to, that is, whether a word is a noun or a verb. Nouns have been reported as earlier acquired compared to verbs (Haman et al, 2015;Łuniewska et al, 2019) and children learn nouns more easily and have larger vocabulary sizes for nouns than verbs (Altman et al, 2017;Haman, Wodniecka, et al, 2017). In tasks usually administered to preschool or school-aged children, nouns depict concrete and imageable objects, which are perceptually easier to learn and identify than verbs, which require understanding events or actions and a relationship between participating entities (McDonough et al, 2011).…”

“…Although AoA can be measured in different ways by looking for example at child corpora (Juhasz, 2005), AoA can also be estimated using subjective, native speakers' reports of when they thought they learnt a particular word (Haman et al, 2015). This measure, despite its subjectivity, has been found to consistently and reliably correlate with parental reports on young children's lexical development across speakers and languages from a wide typological spectrum, regardless of their majority or minority status (Haman et al, 2015;Łuniewska et al, 2019). This is because subjective AoA indirectly measures how long a child has been using a word and how entrenched the use of a word might be.…”

oREV: an Item Response Theory based open receptive vocabulary task for 3 to 8-year-old children

“…Each item consists of a target word and three distractors. To select target words, we first compiled a list of age-of-acquisition ratings for 3,928 German words from various sources (Birchenough, Davies, & Connelly, 2017;Łuniewska et al, 2019;Schröder, Gemballa, Ruppin, & Wartenburger, 2012). From this list, we selected 20 words based on the following criteria: words should refer to concepts that could easily and unambiguously be depicted in a drawing, age-of-acquisition ratings should be spread equally between six and ten years of age.…”