Estimated age of acquisition norms for 834 Portuguese nouns and their relation with other psycholinguistic variables

Abstract

Since the early seventies, several studies have suggested that the age at which words are acquired (age of acquisition, or AoA) is an important predictor of the speed and accuracy with which those words can subsequently be processed in adulthood, with words acquired early in life being processed faster and more accurately than words acquired later (e.g., Carroll & White, 1973b).This effect, referred to in the literature as the "age of acquisition" effect (AoA effect), has been reported in many lexical processing tasks including: oral and written picture naming (e.g., Barry, Morrison, & Ellis, 1997;Bonin, Fayol, & Chalard, 2001;Ellis & Morrison, 1998;Morrison, Chappell, & Ellis, 1997;Severens, Van Lommel, Ratinckx, & Hartsuiker, 2005), face naming (e.g., Moore & Valentine, 1998), word naming (e.g., Gilhooly & Logie, 1981Morrison & Ellis, 1995, category instance fluency (Catling & Johnston, 2005;Forbes-McKay, Ellis, Shanks, & Venneri, 2005;Loftus & Suppes, 1972), word completion (Gilhooly & Gilhooly, 1979), visual and auditory lexical decision (e.g., Morrison & Ellis, 1995Turner, Valentine, & Ellis, 1998), naming from definition (Sartori, Lombardi, & Matiuzzi, 2005) or perceptual identification (Lyons, Teer, & Rubenstein, 1978). Moreover, although AoA measures are related to other lexical variables, at least in word naming and lexical decision tasks, AoA effects have been found to be independent of different measures of word frequency, familiarity, imageability and word length (Morrison & Ellis, 2000).The measurement of AoA has been operationalized in two different ways: a "subjective" measure, corresponding to adult ratings of the AoA of different words; and an "objective" measure based on the performance of children of different ages in object naming tasks. Several studies have shown that both measures of AoA are strongly correlated in different languages (e.g., Carroll & White, 1973a; De Moor, Ghyselink, & Brysbaert, 2000;Jorm, 1991;Lyons et al., 1978;Morrison et al., 1997;Pérez & Navalón, 2005;Pind, Jonsdottir, Gissurardottir, & Jonsson, 2000) providing validation for the rating method. Moreover, Bonin, Barry, Méot, and Chalard (2004) showed that the two measures were still significantly correlated when other lexical variables associated with AoA (including conceptual familiarity, word frequency trajectory, cumulative word frequency, imageability and phonological length) were partialled out.All this evidence would seem to suggest that AoA is an important lexical dimension on its own that can be measured in (at least) two different ways and that influences performance on a very diverse set of tasks. However, both of these contentions are still a matter of ongoing theoretical and methodological debate. On one hand, several criticisms have been pointed out to the two AoA measures and a new measure, "frequency trajectory", has been proposed to examine age-limited learning effects (Bonin et al., 2004;Zevin & Seidenberg, 2002). On the other hand, the independence of AoA and of AoA effects have been contested, esp...

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

“…However, it is quite similar to those reported between the objective AoA and frequency for French (Chalard et al [2003] found correlations that varied from .277 to .365) and for Icelandic (Pind et al [2000] reported a correlation of .390). When it comes to Portuguese, the correlation between AoA and the transformed written-word frequency reported by Marques et al (2007) is higher (r .51). But, if we consider the correlation between AoA and simple written-word frequency, our values and the ones reported by Marques et al are quite similar (r .27 in our study, and r .25 in the Marques et al [2007] study).…”

“…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 834…”

“…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.…”

Imageability and subjective frequency of the 500 rated nouns in the Croatian Lexical Database

“…Lexical databases have been established in some languages, most often English, for which databases exist on imageability, frequency, concreteness, familiarity, meaningfulness and age of acquisition (Paivio, Yuille & Madigan, 1968;Coltheart, 1981;Altarriba, Bauer and Benvenuto, 1999;Balota, Pilotti & Cortese 2001;Bird, Franklin & Howard 2001;Cortese & Khanna, 2008;Brysbaert, Warriner & Kuperman, 2014). Similar lexical data are also available for several other languages, such as Swedish (Blomberg & Öberg, 2015), Norwegian , Portuguese (Marques et al, 2007), Italian (Rofes, de Aguiar & Miceli, 2015), Dutch (Ghyselinck, De Moor & Brysbaert, 2000), and French (Flieller & Tournois, 1994). Some of these database are available online (e.g., Italian, Norwegian, Swedish) and some on paper (Dutch, English).…”

Subjective frequency norms for 330 Spanish simple and compound words

“…Of all the lexical charac-1995; Zeno, Ivenz, Millard, & Duvvuri, 1995;for Dutch, see, e.g., Baayen et al, 1995;for French, see, e.g., Lété, Sprenger-Charolles, & Colé, 2004;New, Pallier, Brysbaert, & Ferrand, 2004;for German, see, e.g., Baayen et al, 1995; for Greek, see, e.g., Ktori, van Heuven, & Pitchford, 2008; for Portuguese, see, e.g., Marques, Fonseca, Morais, & Pinto, 2007;for Spanish, see, e.g., Alameda & Cuetos, 1995;Sebastián-Gallés, Martí, Cuetos, & Carreiras, 2000). In comparison, the range of alphabetic languages for which subjective frequencies are available is limited (for English, see, e.g., Balota, Pilotti, & Cortese, 2001;Carroll, 1971;Shapiro, 1969;Tryk, 1968;for French, see, e.g., Bonin et al, 2003;Desrochers & Bergeron, 2000;Ferrand et al, 2008;Flieller & Tournois, 1994;Forget, 2005;Gonthier, Desrochers, Thompson, & Landry, 2009), as is the pool of words for which subjective frequency estimates are available in these languages.…”