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Andrew W Ellis - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Impaired word recognition in Alzheimer's disease: the role of Age of Acquisition.
Neuropsychologia, 2010Co-Authors: Fernando Cuetos, Elena Herrera, Andrew W EllisAbstract:Abstract Studies of word production in patients with Alzheimer's disease have identified the Age of Acquisition of words as an important predictor of retention or loss, with early acquired words remaining accessible for longer than later acquired words. If, as proposed by current theories, effects of Age of Acquisition reflect the involvement of semantic representations in task performance, then some aspects of word recognition in patients with Alzheimer's disease should also be better for early than later acquired words. We employed a version of the lexical decision task which we term the lexical selection task. This required participants to indicate which of four items on a pAge was a real word (the three ‘foils’ being orthographically plausible nonwords). Twenty-two patients with probable Alzheimer's disease were compared with an equal number of matched controls. The controls made few errors on the test, demonstrating that the controls were cognitively intact, and that the words were familiar to participants of their Age and level of education. The Alzheimer patients were impaired overall, and recognized fewer late than early acquired words correctly. Performance of the Alzheimer patients on the lexical selection task correlated significantly with their scores on the mini mental state examination. Word recognition becomes impaired as Alzheimer's disease progresses, at which point effects of Age of Acquisition can be observed on the accuracy of performance.
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Age of Acquisition affects object recognition and naming in patients with Alzheimer's disease.
Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology, 2006Co-Authors: Selina J. Holmes, Fiona Jane Fitch, Andrew W EllisAbstract:Twenty-two patients with a diagnosis of dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) and a comparison group of 22 Age-matched individuals took part in an object decision and picture naming task. The Age of Acquisition (AoA) of the picture names was manipulated (25 early, 25 late). The comparison group identified significantly more objects as real than the patients. While the comparison group made very few errors in object decision, DAT patients failed to classify significantly more late than early acquired objects as real. The patients also named significantly fewer pictures than the comparison group, showing a differential impairment in naming late acquired objects. Late acquired objects induced proportionately more visual errors in the patients than did early acquired objects. The results are discussed in terms of current theories of Age of Acquisition and of the impact of Alzheimer's disease on lexical and semantic processing.
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Age of Acquisition effects in word recognition and production in first and second languAges
Psicologica, 2002Co-Authors: Cristina Izura, Andrew W EllisAbstract:Four experiments explored the Age of Acquisition effects in the first and second languAges of dominant Spanish-English bilinguals. In Experiment 1 (picture naming task) and Experiment 2 (lexical decision task), an Age of Acquisition effect was observed in a second languAge acquired after childhood as well as in the first languAge. The results suggest that Age of Acquisition effects reflect the order of word Acquisition, which may in turn reflect the state of the lexical network when new words are learnt. The results do not support the idea that Age of Acquisition effects reflect differences between words learned during some critical period in childhood and words learned later in life. In Experiments 3 and 4, the Age/order of second languAge Acquisition affected lexical decision latencies regardless of the Age at which translation equivalents were acquired in the first languAge, suggesting that the Age of Acquisition effect is linked to the Acquisition of word forms rather than meanings. All other things being equal, words learned early in life can be
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Age and Age of Acquisition: An evaluation of the cumulative frequency hypothesis
European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 2002Co-Authors: Catriona M. Morrison, Katherine W. Hirsh, Tameron D. Chappell, Andrew W EllisAbstract:An important determinant of picture and word naming speed is the Age at which the names were learned (Age of Acquisition). Two related interpretations of these effects are that they reflect differences between words in their cumulative frequency of use, or that they reflect differences in the amount of time early and lateacquired words have spent in lexical memory. Both theories predict that differences between early and late-acquired words will be less apparent in older than younger adults. Two experiments are reported in which younger and older adults read words varying in Age of Acquisition or frequency, or named objects varying in Age of Acquisition. There was an observed effect of word frequency only for young adults' word naming. In contrast, strong Age of Acquisition effects were found for both the young and the old participants. The implications of these results for theories of how Age of Acquisition might affect lexical processing are discussed.
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Real Age of Acquisition effects in word naming and lexical decision
British Journal of Psychology, 2000Co-Authors: Catriona M. Morrison, Andrew W EllisAbstract:Age of Acquisition (AoA) has been reported to be a predictor of the speed of reading words aloud (word naming) and lexical decision, with early-acquired words being responded to faster than later-acquired words in both tasks. All previous studies of AoA effects have, however, relied upon adult estimates of word learning Age the validity of which it is easy to cast doubt upon. Using objective Age of Acquisition norms derived from children s naming data, this study shows that AoA effects do not depend upon the use of adult ratings In addition to effects of real AoA, influences of word frequency and orthographic neighbourhood size were obtained in both word naming and lexical decision. ImAge ability affected lexical decision but not word naming, while the characteristics of the words initial phoneme affected word naming but not lexical decision.
Catriona M. Morrison - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Age of Acquisition and Speech Production in L2.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2003Co-Authors: Katherine W. Hirsh, Catriona M. Morrison, Silvia Gaset, Eva CarnicerAbstract:We explored the role of Age of Acquisition in picture naming with a group of unbalanced, late bilinguals and a group of monolinguals. We hypothesised that we would find effects of L2 Age of Acquisition on L2 picture naming performance in late bilinguals if the Age of Acquisition effects we and others have found in L1 picture naming are not limited to languAge capabilities acquired early in the lifespan. In Experiment 1, late bilingual Spanish–English participants named a large set of pictures in their L2 (English). The most important predictor of naming ability was L2 Age of Acquisition. In Experiment 2, monolingual English participants named the same pictures. Naming speed was predicted by L1 Age of Acquisition. Hence speed of picture naming in a given languAge was predicted by Age of Acquisition values for that languAge, that is, L2 values predicted L2 performance (Experiment 1) and L1 values predicted L1 performance (Experiment 2). On the basis of these results we conclude that Age of Acquisition effects are not restricted to items learned before any putative critical period, but should be observed for items learned at any Age. That is, Age of Acquisition effects are more likely to be due to the relative order in which items are acquired within a languAge.
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Age of Acquisition, Ageing, and verb production: normative and experimental data.
The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A Human experimental psychology, 2003Co-Authors: Catriona M. Morrison, Katherine W. Hirsh, Geoffrey B. DugganAbstract:Young and old adults were shown pictured or written verbs and asked to name them as quickly as possible. Simultaneous multiple regression was used to investigate which of a set of potential variables predicted naming speed. Age of Acquisition was found to be an important predictor of naming speed in both young and old adults, and for both word and picture naming. Word frequency predicted picture-naming speed only in older adults and failed to make any significant contribution to word-naming speeds for either group of participants. The respective loci and roles of Age of Acquisition and frequency in lexical processing are discussed in the light of these findings.
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Age and Age of Acquisition: An evaluation of the cumulative frequency hypothesis
European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 2002Co-Authors: Catriona M. Morrison, Katherine W. Hirsh, Tameron D. Chappell, Andrew W EllisAbstract:An important determinant of picture and word naming speed is the Age at which the names were learned (Age of Acquisition). Two related interpretations of these effects are that they reflect differences between words in their cumulative frequency of use, or that they reflect differences in the amount of time early and lateacquired words have spent in lexical memory. Both theories predict that differences between early and late-acquired words will be less apparent in older than younger adults. Two experiments are reported in which younger and older adults read words varying in Age of Acquisition or frequency, or named objects varying in Age of Acquisition. There was an observed effect of word frequency only for young adults' word naming. In contrast, strong Age of Acquisition effects were found for both the young and the old participants. The implications of these results for theories of how Age of Acquisition might affect lexical processing are discussed.
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Real Age of Acquisition effects in word naming and lexical decision
British Journal of Psychology, 2000Co-Authors: Catriona M. Morrison, Andrew W EllisAbstract:Age of Acquisition (AoA) has been reported to be a predictor of the speed of reading words aloud (word naming) and lexical decision, with early-acquired words being responded to faster than later-acquired words in both tasks. All previous studies of AoA effects have, however, relied upon adult estimates of word learning Age the validity of which it is easy to cast doubt upon. Using objective Age of Acquisition norms derived from children s naming data, this study shows that AoA effects do not depend upon the use of adult ratings In addition to effects of real AoA, influences of word frequency and orthographic neighbourhood size were obtained in both word naming and lexical decision. ImAge ability affected lexical decision but not word naming, while the characteristics of the words initial phoneme affected word naming but not lexical decision.
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Real Age-of-Acquisition effects in lexical retrieval.
Journal of experimental psychology. Learning memory and cognition, 1998Co-Authors: Andrew W Ellis, Catriona M. MorrisonAbstract:Previous research on the effects of Age of Acquisition on lexical processing has relied on adult estimates of the Age at which children learn words. The authors report 2 experiments in which effects of Age of Acquisition on lexical retrieval are demonstrated using real Age-of-Acquisition norms. In Experiment 1, real Age of Acquisition emerged as a powerful predictor of adult object-naming speed. There were also significant effects of visual complexity, word frequency, and name agreement. Similar results were obtained in reanalyses of data from 2 other studies of object naming. In Experiment 2, real Age of Acquisition affected immediate but not delayed object-naming speed. The authors conclude that Age-of-Acquisition effects are real and suggest that Age of Acquisition influences the speed with which spoken word forms can be retrieved from the phonological lexicon.
Robert A. Johnston - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Age of Acquisition, word frequency, and picture-word interference.
Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006), 2010Co-Authors: Jonathan C. Catling, Robert A. Johnston, Kevin Dent, Richard BaldingAbstract:In two experiments participants named pictures superimposed with unrelated words. The Age of Acquisition (AoA) of the picture names was manipulated. Additionally, the word frequency (WF, Experiment 1) or AoA (Experiment 2) of the interfering distractor words was manipulated. Early-acquired pictures were named faster than their late-acquired counterparts. Both WF and AoA modulated the degree of interference from the irrelevant word; low-frequency and late-acquired words produced most interference. In neither case did the WF or AoA of the distractor word interact with the AoA of the picture. The results show that in the context of word processing both WF and AoA have similar effects.
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The varying effects of Age of Acquisition.
Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006), 2009Co-Authors: Jonathan C. Catling, Robert A. JohnstonAbstract:There are a number of theories that suggest that Age of Acquisition (AoA) effects are not uniform across different tasks. Catling and Johnston (2006a) found greater AoA effects within an object-naming task than in a semantic classification task. They explained these findings by suggesting that AoA effects might accumulate according to how many levels of representation a task necessitates access to. Brysbaert and Ghyselinck (2006) explain the difference in AoA effects by proposing two distinct types of AoA (frequency dependent and frequency independent), the first accounted for by a connectionist-type mechanism and the latter situated at the interface between semantics and word production. Moreover, Moore, Smith-Spark, and Valentine (2004) and Holmes and Ellis (2006) have suggested that there are two loci of AoA effects: at the phonological level and somewhere within the perceptual level of representation. Again, this could account for the varying degrees of AoA effects. This study sets about testing these ideas by assessing the effect size of AoA across a series of different tasks that necessitate access to various levels of representation. Experiments 1-4 demonstrate significant effects of AoA in a novel picture-picture verification task, an object classification task, a picture verification task, and an object-naming task. Experiment 5 showed no effects of initial phoneme on the naming of the critical objects used within Experiments 1-4. The implication of the varying AoA effect sizes found within Experiments 1-4 in relation to explanations of AoA are discussed.
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Age of Acquisition and lexical processing
Visual Cognition, 2006Co-Authors: Robert A. Johnston, Christopher BarryAbstract:Following a brief history of Age of Acquisition (AoA) research and consideration of measures of AoA, this review examines AoA effects in lexical processing tasks (such as object naming, word reading, and word recognition in the lexical decision task), and in object recognition and semantic processing tasks. It also considers AoA effects in: Memory tasks; face processing tasks; multiple-task studies; and different groups of participants (including bilinguals, aphasics, and deep dyslexics). The review then discusses theoretical accounts of AoA effects, especially within connectionist models, and outlines a number of new and outstanding empirical and theoretical issues in AoA research that are addressed by the papers in this Special Issue.
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Effects of Age of Acquisition and priming on picture naming
Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006), 2006Co-Authors: Jonathan Catling, Robert A. JohnstonAbstract:Four experiments examined the interaction of Age of Acquisition (AoA) and priming on picture naming. Experiment 1 found that initial-letter priming and AoA significantly affected picture-naming latencies, but there was no interaction between them. Experiment 2 found that initial-phoneme priming and AoA significantly affected picture-naming latencies, but again there was no interaction. Experiment 3 repeated Barry, Hirsh, Johnston, and Williams's (2001) priming study using a very short interval between prime and target. Experiment 3 replicated previous findings of a significant interaction between priming and AoA. Experiment 4 repeated this investigation with a procedure that did not require participants to articulate the prime. Once again, there were significant effects of priming, AoA, and the interaction between them. The implications of these findings in relation to accounts of AoA and its locus of effect are discussed.
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Age of Acquisition effects on word generation
European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 2005Co-Authors: Jonathan Catling, Robert A. JohnstonAbstract:An early demonstration of the impact of when words were learned was found by Loftus and Suppes (1972). They showed that children's vocabulary had a significant effect on adult word generation times. However their stimuli were not explicitly rated for Age of Acquisition (AoA). Two experiments in the current study used an adaptation of their methodology but made use of explicit AoA ratings and implemented a matched list design. Stimuli consisted of a category followed by an initial letter of a category member, e.g., Vegetable: C. In the first experiment two groups of early and late acquired words were selected. These groups were balanced on all of the relevant independent variables. Results showed that the earlier acquired target words were produced significantly faster than the later acquired target words. In the second experiment two groups of high and low frequency words were selected. These groups were balanced for AoA and on other relevant variables. There was no significant effect of frequency on word...
Marc Brysbaert - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Norms of Age of Acquisition and concreteness for 30,000 Dutch words.
Acta psychologica, 2014Co-Authors: Marc Brysbaert, Simon De Deyne, Michaël Stevens, Wouter Voorspoels, Gerrit StormsAbstract:Word processing studies increasingly make use of regression analyses based on large numbers of stimuli (the so-called megastudy approach) rather than experimental designs based on small factorial designs. This requires the availability of word features for many words. Following similar studies in English, we present and validate ratings of Age of Acquisition and concreteness for 30,000 Dutch words. These include nearly all lemmas languAge researchers are likely to be interested in. The ratings are freely available for research purposes.
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Age-of-Acquisition ratings for 30,000 English words
Behavior research methods, 2012Co-Authors: Victor Kuperman, Hans Stadthagen-gonzalez, Marc BrysbaertAbstract:We present Age-of-Acquisition (AoA) ratings for 30,121 English content words (nouns, verbs, and adjectives). For data collection, this megastudy used the Web-based crowdsourcing technology offered by the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our data indicate that the ratings collected in this way are as valid and reliable as those collected in laboratory conditions (the correlation between our ratings and those collected in the lab from U.S. students reached .93 for a subsample of 2,500 monosyllabic words). We also show that our AoA ratings explain a substantial percentAge of the variance in the lexical-decision data of the English Lexicon Project, over and above the effects of log frequency, word length, and similarity to other words. This is true not only for the lemmas used in our rating study, but also for their inflected forms. We further discuss the relationships of AoA with other predictors of word recognition and illustrate the utility of AoA ratings for research on vocabulary growth.
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Do the effects of subjective frequency and Age of Acquisition survive better word frequency norms
Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006), 2010Co-Authors: Marc Brysbaert, Michael J. CorteseAbstract: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 effect of Age of Acquisition partly frequency related partly frequency independent
Visual Cognition, 2006Co-Authors: Marc Brysbaert, Mandy GhyselinckAbstract: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.
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Age-of-Acquisition ratings for 2332 Dutch words from 49 different semantic categories
Psychologica Belgica, 2003Co-Authors: Mandy Ghyselinck, Roel Custers, Marc BrysbaertAbstract:Words differ with respect to their frequency-of-occurrence in the languAge and with respect to the Age at which they are acquired. Research has indicated that both variables have a large impact on the speed of processing in a multitude of psycholinguistic tasks. A problem for the research, however, is that the information about the Age of Acquisition for many types of words is very limited. In Dutch, the information is largely confined to short words. Because there is increasing evidence that Age of Acquisition may be an important variable in the organisation of the semantic system, we present data about 2,332 carefully selected words from 49 different semantic categories. These will provide researchers with the information needed to test a wide range of hypotheses about the origins of the Age-of-Acquisition effect and to adequately select their stimuli for semantic categorisation tasks.
Christopher Barry - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Age of Acquisition and lexical processing
Visual Cognition, 2006Co-Authors: Robert A. Johnston, Christopher BarryAbstract:Following a brief history of Age of Acquisition (AoA) research and consideration of measures of AoA, this review examines AoA effects in lexical processing tasks (such as object naming, word reading, and word recognition in the lexical decision task), and in object recognition and semantic processing tasks. It also considers AoA effects in: Memory tasks; face processing tasks; multiple-task studies; and different groups of participants (including bilinguals, aphasics, and deep dyslexics). The review then discusses theoretical accounts of AoA effects, especially within connectionist models, and outlines a number of new and outstanding empirical and theoretical issues in AoA research that are addressed by the papers in this Special Issue.
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Age of Acquisition effects in the semantic processing of pictures.
Memory & cognition, 2005Co-Authors: Robert A. Johnston, Christopher BarryAbstract:In two experiments, we investigated the role of Age of Acquisition (AoA) in the categorizing of objects in semantic tasks that do not require access to the object names. In both afound inside or outside the house (Experiment 1A) and asmaller or larger than a loaf of bread (Experiment 2A) classification task, objects with earlier-acquired names were categorized more quickly than those with later-acquired names. Experiments 1B and 2B also showed AoA effects on object-naming times for the same pictures. We conclude that AoA operates within the identification process in a fashion not simply restricted to name retrieval. These effects may be better explained in terms of the connectionist model proposed by Ellis and Lambon Ralph (2000) or by accounts that locate AoA within the semantic system (e.g., Brysbaert, Van Wijnendaele, & De Deyne, 2000; van Loon-Vervoorn, 1989).
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When does a deep dyslexic make a semantic error? The roles of Age-of-Acquisition, concreteness, and frequency.
Brain and language, 2000Co-Authors: Simon Gerhand, Christopher BarryAbstract:Semantic reading errors are the central and defining feature of deep dyslexia. This study compared the words the deep dyslexic patient LW read correctly with those she omitted and those to which she produced semantic errors in terms of their concreteness, Age-of-Acquisition, frequency, and length. Semantic errors were made to less concrete, later-acquired, and shorter words than were read correctly; there was no reliable effect of word frequency. More importantly, the actual semantic errors produced were later-acquired than the stimulus words, but they were not more concrete or reliably more frequent. These results implicate Age-of-Acquisition in the process that produces semantic errors. It is proposed that concreteness determines the specificity of the semantic system to activate a set of candidate responses and that Age-of-Acquisition biases the ease with which certain words can be selected from this set to be produced as reading responses.
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Age-of-Acquisition and frequency effects in speeded word naming
Cognition, 1999Co-Authors: Simon Gerhand, Christopher BarryAbstract:An experiment was conducted to assess the importance of Age-of-Acquisition and frequency in a speeded word naming task, where participants were instructed to read aloud words before they disappeared from the computer screen. Under such speeded naming instructions, reading latencies were over 100 ms (or 20%) faster than in “standard” (or immediate) word naming. There were clear effects of word frequency and Age-of-Acquisition under speeded naming. Compared to standard immediate naming, the Age-of-Acquisition effect was larger, with early-acquired words being speeded up more than late-acquired words, which is interpreted in terms of speeded naming reducing the contribution of sublexical processing to word naming times.
