Age of acquisition predicts naming and lexical-decision performance above and beyond 22 other predictor variables: An analysis of 2,342 words

Using Monte-Carlo simulation to test predictions about the time-course of semantic and lexical access in reading

One of the main theoretical distinctions between reading models is how and when they predict semantic processing occurs. Some models assume semantic activation occurs after word-form is retrieved. Other models assume there is no-word form, and that what people think of as word-form is actually just semantics. These models thus predict semantic effects should occur early in reading. Results showing words with inconsistent spelling-sound correspondences are faster to read aloud if they are imageable/concrete compared to if they are abstract have been used as evidence supporting this prediction, although null-effects have also been reported. To investigate this, I used Monte-Carlo simulation to create a large set of simulated experiments from RTs taken from different databases. The results showed significant main effects of concreteness and spelling-sound consistency, as well as age-of-acquisition, a variable that can potentially confound the results. Alternatively, simulations showing a significant interaction between spelling-sound consistency and concreteness did not occur above chance, even without controlling for age-of-acquisition. These results support models that use lexical form. In addition, they suggest significant interactions from previous experiments may have occurred due to idiosyncratic items affecting the results and random noise causing the occasional statistical error.

Spelling monosyllabic English words

We conducted a megastudy to examine the spelling of American English monosyllables with typewritten responses. We related both sublexical and lexical/semantic factors to spelling accuracy and reaction time (RT) for the first keypress and response duration for spelling 1,856 monophonic monosyllables. We found that (a) each of 13 predictor variables was significantly related to performance for at least one measure, (b) orthographic length was unrelated to the first key RT, but did relate to accuracy and response duration, (c) sound-spelling and spelling-sound consistency was related to performance, and in particular, onset consistency related to accuracy and first key RT, but was unrelated to response duration, (d) contextual diversity was consistently related to performance across all measures, and (e) age of acquisition (AoA) was related to all measures, but was related more to the first key RT than response duration. The results indicate that people begin the spelling process once they identify the first letter, and they continue to process the spelling pattern as the response unfolds. These results are best explained by a parallel-distributed-processing framework.

Orthography-phonology consistency in English: Theory- and data-driven measures and their impact on auditory vs. visual word recognition

Research on orthographic consistency in English words has selectively identified different sub-syllabic units in isolation (grapheme, onset, vowel, coda, rime), yet there is no comprehensive assessment of how these measures affect word identification when taken together. To study which aspects of consistency are more psychologically relevant, we investigated their independent and composite effects on human reading behavior using large-scale databases. Study 1 found effects on adults' naming responses of both feedforward consistency (orthography to phonology) and feedback consistency (phonology to orthography). Study 2 found feedback but no feedforward consistency effects on visual and auditory lexical decision tasks, with the best predictor being a composite measure of consistency across grapheme, rime, OVC, and word-initial letter-phoneme. In Study 3, we explicitly modeled the reading process with forward and backward flow in a bidirectionally connected neural network. The model captured latent dimensions of quasi-regular mapping that explain additional variance in human reading and spelling behavior, compared to the established measures. Together, the results suggest interactive activation between phonological and orthographic word representations. They also validate the role of computational analyses of language to better understand how print maps to sound, and what properties of natural language affect reading complexity.

Subjective age of acquisition norms for 1604 English words by Spanish L2 speakers of English and their relationship with lexico-semantic, affective, sociolinguistic and proficiency variables

Psycholinguistic studies have shown that there are many variables implicated in language comprehension and production. At the lexical level, subjective age of acquisition (AoA), the estimate of the age at which a word is acquired, is key for stimuli selection in psycholinguistic studies. AoA databases in English are often used when testing a variety of phenomena in second language (L2) speakers of English. However, these have limitations, as the norms are not provided by the target population (L2 speakers of English) but by native English speakers. In this study, we asked native Spanish L2 speakers of English to provide subjective AoA ratings for 1604 English words, and investigated whether factors related to 14 lexico-semantic and affective variables, both in Spanish and English, and to the speakers' profile (i.e., sociolinguistic variables and L2 proficiency), were related to the L2 AoA ratings. We used boosted regression trees, an advanced form of regression analysis based on machine learning and boosting algorithms, to analyse the data. Our results showed that the model accounted for a relevant proportion of deviance (58.56%), with the English AoA provided by native English speakers being the strongest predictor for L2 AoA. Additionally, L2 AoA correlated with L2 reaction times. Our database is a useful tool for the research community running psycholinguistic studies in L2 speakers of English. It adds knowledge about which factors-linked to the characteristics of both the linguistic stimuli and the speakers-affect L2 subjective AoA. The database and the data can be downloaded from: https://osf.io/gr8xd/?view_only=73b01dccbedb4d7897c8d104d3d68c46 .

The Chinese Lexicon Project II: A megastudy of speeded naming performance for 25,000+ traditional Chinese two-character words

Using a megastudy approach, (Tse et al., 2017 Behavior Research Methods, 49, 1503-1519) established a large-scale repository of lexical variables and lexical decision responses for more than 25,000 traditional Chinese two-character words. In the current study, we expand their database by collecting norms for speeded naming reaction times (RTs) and accuracy rates, and compiling more lexical variables (e.g., phonological consistency and semantic neighborhood size). Following Tse et al.'s procedure, about 33 college-aged native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong read aloud each word. We conducted item-level regression analyses to test the relative predictive power of orthographic variables (e.g., stroke count), phonological variables (e.g., phonological consistency), and semantic variables (e.g., semantic transparency) in naming performance. We also compared the effects of lexical variables on naming performance and Tse et al.'s lexical decision performance to examine the extent to which effects are task-specific or task-general. Freely accessible to the research community, this resource provides a valuable addition to other influential mega-databases, such as the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2004 Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 283-316), and furthers our understanding of Chinese word recognition processes.

Specificity ratings for Italian data

Abstraction enables us to categorize experience, learn new information, and form judgments. Language arguably plays a crucial role in abstraction, providing us with words that vary in specificity (e.g., highly generic: tool vs. highly specific: muffler). Yet, human-generated ratings of word specificity are virtually absent. We hereby present a dataset of specificity ratings collected from Italian native speakers on a set of around 1K Italian words, using the Best-Worst Scaling method. Through a series of correlation studies, we show that human-generated specificity ratings have low correlation coefficients with specificity metrics extracted automatically from WordNet, suggesting that WordNet does not reflect the hierarchical relations of category inclusion present in the speakers' minds. Moreover, our ratings show low correlations with concreteness ratings, suggesting that the variables Specificity and Concreteness capture two separate aspects involved in abstraction and that specificity may need to be controlled for when investigating conceptual concreteness. Finally, through a series of regression studies we show that specificity explains a unique amount of variance in decision latencies (lexical decision task), suggesting that this variable has theoretical value. The results are discussed in relation to the concept and investigation of abstraction.

A modified procedure for naming 332 pictures and collecting norms: Using tangram pictures in psycholinguistic studies

Tangram pictures are abstract pictures which may be used as stimuli in various fields of experimental psychology and are often used in the field of dialogue psychology. The present study provides the first norms for a set of 332 tangram pictures. These pictures were standardized on a set of variables classically used in the literature on cognitive processes, such as visual perception, language, and memory: name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, and age of acquisition. Furthermore, norms for concreteness were also provided owing to the influence of this variable on the processes involved in lexical production. Correlational analyses on all variables were performed on the data collected from French native speakers. This new set of standardized pictures constitutes a reliable database for researchers when they select tangram pictures. Given the abstract nature of tangram pictures, this paper also discusses the similarities and differences with the literature on line drawings, and highlights their value for dialogue psychology studies, for psycholinguistics studies, and for cognitive psychology in general.

Age of Acquisition and Spoken Words: Examining Hemispheric Differences in Lexical Processing

The relationship between the age of acquisition (AoA) of words and their cerebral hemispheric representation is controversial because the experimental results have been contradictory. However, most of the lexical processing experiments were performed with stimuli consisting of written words. If we want to compare the processing of words learned very early in infancy-when children cannot read-with words learned later, it seems more logical to employ spoken words as experimental stimuli. This study, based on the auditory lexical decision task, used spoken words that were classified according to an objective criterion of AoA with extremely distant means (2.88 vs. 9.28 years old). As revealed by the reaction times, both early and late words were processed more efficiently in the left hemisphere, with no AoA × Hemisphere interaction. The results are discussed from a theoretical point of view, considering that all the experiments were conducted using adult participants.

The influence of oral vocabulary knowledge on individual differences in a computational model of reading

Studies have demonstrated systematic individual differences in the degree of semantic reliance (SR) when reading aloud exception words in adult skilled readers. However, the origins of individual differences in reading remain unclear. Using a connectionist model of reading, this study investigated whether oral vocabulary knowledge may affect the degree of SR as a potential source of individual differences in reading. Variety in oral vocabulary knowledge was simulated by training the model to learn the mappings between spoken and meaning word forms with different vocabulary sizes and quantities of exposure to these vocabularies. The model's SR in the reading aloud task was computed. The result demonstrated that the model with varying amounts of oral exposure and vocabulary sizes had different levels of SR. Critically, SR was able to predict the performance of the model on reading aloud and nonword reading, which assimilated behavioural reading patterns. Further analysis revealed that SR was largely associated with the interaction between oral vocabulary exposure and oral vocabulary size. When the amount of exposure was limited, SR significantly increased with vocabulary sizes but decreased then with vocabulary sizes. Overall, the simulation results provide the first computational evidence of the direct link between oral vocabulary knowledge and the degree of SR as a source of individual differences in reading.

SpaVerb-WN-A megastudy of naming times for 4562 Spanish verbs: Effects of psycholinguistic and motor content variables

Several studies have been carried out in various languages to explore the role of the main psycholinguistic variables in word naming, mainly in nouns. However, reading of verbs has not been explored to the same extent, despite the differences that have been found between the processing of nouns and verbs. To reduce this research gap, we present here SpaVerb-WN, a megastudy of word naming in Spanish, with response times (RT) for 4562 verbs. RT were obtained from at least 20 healthy adult participants in a reading-aloud task. Several research questions on the role of syllable frequency, word length, neighbourhood, frequency, age of acquisition (AoA), and the novel variable 'motor content' in verb naming were also examined. Linear mixed-effects model analyses indicated that (1) RT increase in with increasing word length and with decreasing neighbourhood size, (2) syllable frequency does not show a significant effect on RT, (3) AoA mediates the effect of motor content, with a positive slope of motor content at low AoA scores and a negative slope at high AoA scores, and (4) there is an interaction between word frequency and AoA, in which the AoA effect for low-frequency verbs gradually decreases as frequency increases. The results are discussed in relation to existing evidence and in the context of the consistency of the spelling-sound mappings in Spanish.

Age of acquisition of personality terms: Implications for personality theory

Analysis of the age of acquisition (AoA) of personality terms represents a genetic method for the study of the individual personality lexicon and offers a potential alternative to correlational analysis for identifying the fundamental personality descriptors among the thousands of terms that appear in language. In the present study, the relationship between AoA, word frequency, word desirability, and factor loading in the Big Five and Hexaco models of 274 and 408 personality adjectives was analyzed. It was found that young children (2nd graders or younger) acquire personality terms that represent traits at the core of the broad personality factors in the Big Five and Hexaco models slightly earlier than words that represent more peripheral traits. In older children beyond second grade, the correlation between factor loading and AoA is weak. Words that describe the broad openness and stability/emotionality aspects of personality are learned later than words for the other broad factors. Word frequency (in book texts) and desirability have a weak negative correlation with AoA. It is hypothesized that the AoA of a personality term reflects the importance of the corresponding trait for children and may be used as one criterion for ranking facet level traits independent of the broad factors.

Corpus-based age of word acquisition: Does it support the validity of adult age-of-acquisition ratings?

Age of acquisition (AoA) is presumed to reflect the age or relative order in which words are learned, but is often measured using adult ratings or adult-reported observations and might thus reflect more about the adult language than about the acquisition process. Objective AoA estimates are often limited to words whose referents can be shown in pictures. We created a corpus-derived AoA estimate based on first word occurrences in a longitudinal corpus of child English, and evaluated its reliability and validity against other measures of AoA. Then we used these different measures as concurrent predictors of adult lexical decision times. Our results showed adequate reliability and good relations with other AoA measures, especially with parent-reported AoA (r = 0.56). Corpus AoA did not predict unique variance in lexical decision times, while adult AoA ratings and parent-reported AoA did. We argue that this pattern is due to two factors. First, the adult AoA ratings and parent-reported AoA are confounded with adult memory, lexical processing and reading difficulty variables. Second, the adult AoA ratings are related to actual age of acquisition only for words acquired during later preschool and school age. Our analyses support the utility of corpus-derived AoA estimates as an objective measure of acquisition age, especially for early-acquired words.

Standardizing norms for 180 coloured Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures in Kannada language

This study presents normative data in Kannada for 180 coloured Snodgrass & Vanderwart pictures. Data are presented for naming latency, image agreement, picture-name agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, and age of acquisition (AoA). Sixty-eight native Kannada speaking adults completed all tasks. The effects of the rated variables on naming latency were examined and compared with data on the same variables in other languages. A regression analysis revealed that image agreement, name agreement, familiarity, and age of acquisition all had a significant impact on naming latency, while visual complexity and frequency did not. Although, the correlations among rated variables in Kannada were equivalent to previous normative studies, the cross-linguistic comparison revealed that only AoA was strongly correlated with other studies. The findings point to the importance of understanding the interplay of psycholinguistic variables on naming latency in different languages.

Animals in multidimensional space: Interpreting coordinates throughout lexical-semantic features in mild cognitive impairment and control subjects

INTRODUCTION

Semantic verbal fluency is a useful neuropsychological tool since it involves language and executive abilities that can be impaired in patients with neurodegenerative diseases in comparison to healthy controls. The present study explores retrieve and executive control processes using traditional quantitative and qualitative raw scores and examines the utility of multidimensional scaling combined with linear regression to provide new insights about the underlying semantic network in mild cognitive impairment and in healthy older adults.

METHOD

A total of 165 Spanish older adults, 81 patients and 84 controls, were assessed in different cognitive domains and evoked animal names in one minute. Group differences on fluency raw scores were first explored. Regressions using tests to predict groups' fluency scores were also performed. The 12 animals that had been produced more frequently were selected to perform a multidimensional scaling analysis for each group. Four features related to animal names were extracted from normative studies and then were used as predictors in linear regression to provide an interpretation of the resulting dimensions' coordinates.

RESULTS

Patients performed worse on memory and naming and produced a shorter list of animals than controls. In controls, naming and visual memory explained a small part of variance related to the total of animals produced and to the number of switches. Both groups exhibited similar semantic maps.

CONCLUSIONS

Results suggest that patients' map is influenced by words with a dense associative neighborhood that were acquired at an early age, whereas in controls none of the predictors explained dimensions.

What, Where, When and How of Visual Word Recognition: A Bibliometrics Review

The neural/mental operations involved in the process of visual word recognition (VWR) are fundamental for the efficient comprehension of written/printed words during reading. The present study used CiteSpace, a visual analysis software, to identify the intellectual landscape where VWR has been reviewed in the past decade. Thus, synthesized co-citation networks were analyzed to explore and discuss the main questions raised in the VWR literature: the research fronts and the emerging trends of research on this topic. Our results showed that the main questions addressed in VWR studies during the last decade have been focused on four main aspects related to "what," "where," "when," and "how" of VWR; to be specific, the different types of representations assessed during VWR ("what"), the locations and the timing of the brain activity involved in VWR ("where" and "when"), and the interactivity among different representations during processing ("how"). Among the revised studies, letter position coding was found to be the main topic of interest, possibly reflecting the critical role of this process. Furthermore, the evidence found in these studies consistently supported that VWR implies access to phonological, semantic, and morphological representations, which interact and modulate the processing of written words, particularly during early stages. Altogether, our findings showed the evolution in VWR literature regarding the different cognitive and neural operations involved in this process, highlighting the growing interest over the last decade toward the top-down way that mental representations interact.

Assessing Lexical Psychological Properties in Second Language Production: A Dynamic Semantic Similarity Approach

Previous studies of the lexical psycholinguistic properties (LPPs) in second language (L2) production have assessed the degree of an LPP dimension of an L2 corpus by computing the mean ratings of unique content words in the corpus for that dimension, without considering the possibility that learners at different proficiency levels may perceive the degree of that dimension of the same words differently. This study extended a dynamic semantic similarity algorithm to estimate the degree of five different LPP dimensions of several sub-corpora of the Education First-Cambridge Open Language Database representing L2 English learners at different proficiency levels. Our findings provide initial evidence for the validity of the algorithm for assessing the LPPs in L2 production and contribute useful insights into between-proficiency relationships and cross-proficiency differences in the LPPs in L2 production as well as the relationships among different LPP dimensions.

Psycholinguistic norms for a set of 506 French compound words

Compounds are morphologically complex words made of different linguistic parts. They are very prevalent in a number of languages such as French. Different psycholinguistic characteristics of compounds have been used in certain studies to investigate the mechanisms involved in compound processing (see Table 7). We provide psycholinguistic norms for a set of 506 French compound words. The words were normed on seven characteristics: lexeme meaning dominance, semantic transparency, sensory experience, conceptual familiarity, imageability, age of acquisition (AoA) and subjective frequency. Reliability measures were computed for the collected norms. Descriptive statistical analyses, and correlational and multiple regression analyses were performed. We also report some comparisons made between our normative data and certain norms obtained in other similar studies. The entire set of norms, which will be very useful to researchers investigating the processing of compounds, is available as Supplemental Material.

Aging affects steaks more than knives: Evidence that the processing of words related to motor skills is relatively spared in aging

Lexical-processing declines are a hallmark of aging. However, the extent of these declines may vary as a function of different factors. Motivated by findings from neurodegenerative diseases and healthy aging, we tested whether 'motor-relatedness' (the degree to which words are associated with particular human body movements) might moderate such declines. We investigated this question by examining data from three experiments. The experiments were carried out in different languages (Dutch, German, English) using different tasks (lexical decision, picture naming), and probed verbs and nouns, in all cases controlling for potentially confounding variables (e.g., frequency, age-of-acquisition, imageability). Whereas 'non-motor words' (e.g., steak) showed age-related performance decreases in all three experiments, 'motor words' (e.g., knife) yielded either smaller decreases (in one experiment) or no decreases (in two experiments). The findings suggest that motor-relatedness can attenuate or even prevent age-related lexical declines, perhaps due to the relative sparing of neural circuitry underlying such words.

Fine Motor Skills and Lexical Processing in Children and Adults

Children’s fine motor skills (FMS) link to cognitive development, however, research on their involvement in language processing, also with adults, is scarce. Lexical items are processed differently depending on the degree of sensorimotor information inherent in the words’ meanings, such as whether these imply a body-object interaction (BOI) or a body-part association (i.e., hand, arm, mouth, foot). Accordingly, three studies examined whether lexical processing was affected by FMS, BOIness, and body-part associations in children (study 1, n = 77) and adults (study 2, n = 80; study 3, n = 71). Analyses showed a differential link between FMS and lexical processing as a function of age. Whereas response latencies indicated that children’s FMS were associated with “hand” words, adults’ FMS linked to the broader concept of BOI. Findings have implications for shared activation theories positing that FMS support lexical processing.

Probing Lexical Ambiguity: Word Vectors Encode Number and Relatedness of Senses

Lexical ambiguity-the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses-is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to semantics, in which a word's meaning is determined by its contexts, have led to successful research quantifying the degree of ambiguity, but these measures have not distinguished between the ambiguity of words with multiple related senses versus multiple unrelated meanings. In this work, we present the first assessment of whether distributional meaning representations can capture the ambiguity structure of a word, including both the number and relatedness of senses. On a very large sample of English words, we find that some, but not all, distributional semantic representations that we test exhibit detectable differences between sets of monosemes (unambiguous words; N = 964), polysemes (with multiple related senses; N = 4,096), and homonyms (with multiple unrelated senses; N = 355). Our findings begin to answer open questions from earlier work regarding whether distributional semantic representations of words, which successfully capture various semantic relationships, also reflect fine-grained aspects of meaning structure that influence human behavior. Our findings emphasize the importance of measuring whether proposed lexical representations capture such distinctions: In addition to standard benchmarks that test the similarity structure of distributional semantic models, we need to also consider whether they have cognitively plausible ambiguity structure.

How well imageability, concreteness, perceptual strength, and action strength predict recognition memory, lexical decision, and reading aloud performance

We examined how well imageability, concreteness, perceptual strength, and action strength predicted recognition memory, lexical decision, and reading aloud performance. We used our imageability estimates [Cortese, M. J., & Fugett, A. (2004). Imageability ratings for 3,000 monosyllabic words. Behavior Methods and Research, Instrumentation, & Computers, 36(3), 384-387. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195585; Schock, J., Cortese, M. J., & Khanna, M. M. (2012a). Imageability ratings for 3,000 disyllabic words. Behavior Research Methods, 44(2), 374-379. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-011-0162-0], concreteness norms of Brysbaert and colleagues [Brysbaert, M., Warriner, A. B., & Kuperman, V. (2014). Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English lemmas. Behavior Research Methods, 46(3), 904-911. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0403-5], and perceptual and action strength ratings of Lynott and colleagues [Lynott, D., Connell, L., Brysbaert, M., Brand, J., & Carney, J. (2020). The lancaster sensorimotor norms: Multidimensional measures of perceptual and action strength for 40,000 English words. Behavior Research Methods, 52(3), 1271-1291. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01316-z]. Our results indicate imageability is the best predictor, but methodological differences between ratings studies may contribute to the results. Surprisingly, action strength was negatively (albeit weakly) related to recognition memory. Analyses of item zRTs from the English lexicon project indicate these variables were not strong predictors of reading aloud or lexical decision performance. However, there is a small, consistent positive relationship between concreteness and zRTs (i.e., a facilitative abstractness effect). We believe researchers should either employ or control for imageability rather than concreteness, perceptual strength, or action strength when conducting recognition memory experiments. In addition, image-based codes generated at encoding strengthen memory traces but do not provide major inputs into reading aloud and lexical decision processes. Also, the facilitative abstractness effect on lexical decision and reading aloud zRTs may reflect more robust lexical representations for abstract words than concrete words, and that these two constructs are distinct.

Age of acquisition effects on traditional Chinese character naming and lexical decision

Across languages, age of acquisition (AoA) is a critical psycholinguistic factor in lexical processing, reflecting the influence of learning experience. Early-acquired words tend to be processed more quickly and accurately than late-acquired words. Recently, an integrated view proposed that both the mappings between representations and the construction of semantic representations contribute to AoA effects, thus, predicting larger AoA effects for words with arbitrary mappings between representations as well as for tasks requiring greater semantic processing. We investigated how these predictions generalize to the Chinese language system that differs from alphabetic languages regarding the ease of mappings and semantic involvement in lexical processing. A cross-task investigation of differential psycholinguistic effects was conducted with large character naming and lexical decision datasets to establish the extent to which semantics is involved in the two tasks. We focused on examining the effect sizes of lexical-semantic variables and AoA, and the interaction between AoA and consistency. The results demonstrated that semantics influenced Chinese character naming more than lexical decision, which is in contrast with the findings related to English language, though, critically, AoA effects were more pronounced for character naming than for lexical decision. Additionally, an interaction between AoA and consistency was found in character naming. Our findings provide cross-linguistic evidence supporting the view of multiple origins of AoA effects in the language-processing system.

Psycholinguistic norms for more than 300 lexical signs in German Sign Language (DGS)

Sign language offers a unique perspective on the human faculty of language by illustrating that linguistic abilities are not bound to speech and writing. In studies of spoken and written language processing, lexical variables such as, for example, age of acquisition have been found to play an important role, but such information is not as yet available for German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache, DGS). Here, we present a set of norms for frequency, age of acquisition, and iconicity for more than 300 lexical DGS signs, derived from subjective ratings by 32 deaf signers. We also provide additional norms for iconicity and transparency for the same set of signs derived from ratings by 30 hearing non-signers. In addition to empirical norming data, the dataset includes machine-readable information about a sign’s correspondence in German and English, as well as annotations of lexico-semantic and phonological properties: one-handed vs. two-handed, place of articulation, most likely lexical class, animacy, verb type, (potential) homonymy, and potential dialectal variation. Finally, we include information about sign onset and offset for all stimulus clips from automated motion-tracking data. All norms, stimulus clips, data, as well as code used for analysis are made available through the Open Science Framework in the hope that they may prove to be useful to other researchers: 10.17605/OSF.IO/MZ8J4

Re-assessing age of acquisition effects in recognition, free recall, and serial recall

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which a person learns a word. Research has converged on the conclusion that early AoA words are processed more efficiently than late AoA words on a number of perceptual and reading tasks. However, only a few studies have investigated whether AoA affects memory on recognition, serial recall, and free recall tests, and the results are equivocal. We took advantage of the recent increase in the number of high-quality norms and databases to construct a pool of early and late AoA words that were equated on numerous other dimensions. There was a late AoA advantage in recognition using both pure (Experiment 1) and mixed (Experiment 2) lists, no effect of AoA on serial recall of either pure (Experiment 3) or mixed (Experiment 4) lists, and no effect of AoA on free recall of either pure (Experiment 5) or mixed lists (Experiment 6). We conclude that AoA does reliably affect memory on some memory tasks (recognition), but not others (serial recall, free recall), and that no current account of AoA can explain the findings.

Psycholinguistic norms for 92 action pictures and verbs in the Persian language in young- and middle-aged people

A verb as the fundamental part of a sentence is important and its retrieval consists of different cognitive stages. Additionally, verb retrieval difficulty is reported in some types of aphasia and other neurological diseases, and some psycholinguistic variables can influence the verb retrieval process. This study aimed to provide a normative database in the Persian language for 92 black and white action pictures and related verbs in two groups of young ages (20 to 40 years old) and middle ages (41 to 64 years old). A total of 150 volunteers participated in this study, and the groups had similar characteristics due to education. The pictures were normed for variables such as name agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, age of acquisition, and image agreement. Correlation coefficients were calculated values among these measures, and comparisons were made between the two age groups. The results of the comparisons between the two groups showed that name agreement and familiarities were age-dependent. The results revealed that all measures varied with age. Also, the present study provided a set of verbs and their pictures in the Persian language and normative data were obtained on the psycholinguistic variables such that it can be used for clinical practice and research in the areas of verb processing and their naming.

The hunt for the age of acquisition effect: It's in the links!

The Age of Acquisition (AoA) effect is such that words acquired early in life are processed more quickly than later-acquired words. One explanation for the AoA effects is the arbitrary mapping hypothesis (Ellis & Lambon-Ralph, 2000), stating that the AoA effects are more likely to occur in items that have an arbitrary, rather than a systematic, nature between input and output. Previous behavioural findings have shown that the AoA effects are larger in pictorial than word items. However, no behavioural studies have attempted to directly assess the AoA effects in relation to the connections between representations. In the first two experiments, 48 participants completed a word-picture verification task (Experiments 1A and 2A), together with a spoken (Experiment 1B) or written (Experiment 2B) picture naming task. In the third and fourth experiments, 48 participants complete a picture-word verification task (Experiments 3A and 4A), together with a spoken (Experiment 3B) or written (Experiment 4B) word naming task. For each pair of experiments the subtraction of the naming latencies from the verification tasks for each item per participant was calculated (Experiments 1-4C; e.g. Santiago, Mackay, Palma & Rho, 2000). Results showed that early-acquired items were responded to more quickly than late-acquired ones for all experiments, except for Experiment 3B (spoken word naming) where the AoA effect was shown for only low-frequency words. In addition, the subtraction results for pictorial stimuli demonstrated strong AoA effects. This strengthens the case for the AM hypothesis, also suggesting the AoA effect resides in the connections between representations.

The Emotional Verbal Fluency Task: A Close Examination of Verbal Productivity and Lexical-Semantic Properties

Purpose Emotional verbal fluency (Emo-VF) has the potential to expand neuropsychological assessment by providing information about affective memory retrieval. The usability of Emo-VF is limited, however, by significant variations in task administration and the lack of information about Emo-VF responses. This study investigated verbal productivity and the lexical-semantic properties of responses on positive and negative Emo-VF tasks. Comparing Emo-VF to non-Emo-VF tasks used regularly in neuropsychological assessment provided additional information about the basic characteristics of Emo-VF tasks. Method Twenty-five adult native speakers provided verbal responses to three Emo-VF ("happy," "sad," "negative emotions") and two non-Emo-VF categories ("animals," "things people do"). Verbal productivity was measured at the word and syllable levels. Multiple large-scale data corpora were used to estimate the lexical-semantic properties of the verbal responses. Results There was a robust positivity bias in verbal productivity within Emo-VF tasks. Emo-VF tasks tended to elicit longer words than "animals" and "things people do," which might impact the results of verbal productivity analyses, especially in comparisons with "things people do." Within Emo-VF tasks, negative Emo-VF elicited words from a wider range of valence than positive Emo-VF tasks. Similarities (e.g., word length and complexity) and differences (e.g., concreteness, age of acquisition) were found between positive and negative Emo-VF tasks. Conclusions The study provided information about the basic characteristics of Emo-VF tasks, which included evidence for a robust positivity bias, suggestions for analyses of verbal productivity (e.g., consideration of word length), and lexical-semantic properties associated with positive and negative Emo-VF tasks using corpora data.

Cross-Linguistic Word Recognition Development Among Chinese Children: A Multilevel Linear Mixed-Effects Modeling Approach

The effects of psycholinguistic variables on reading development are critical to the evaluation of theories about the reading system. Although we know that the development of reading depends on both individual differences (endogenous) and item-level effects (exogenous), developmental research has focused mostly on average-level performance, ignoring individual differences. We investigated how the development of word recognition in Chinese children in both Chinese and English is affected by (a) item-level, exogenous effects (word frequency, radical consistency, and curricular grade level); (b) subject-level, endogenous individual differences (orthographic awareness and phonological awareness); and (c) their interactive effect. We tested native Chinese (Putonghua)-speaking children (n = 763) in grades 1 to 6 with both Chinese character and English word identification (lexical) decision tasks. Our findings show that (a) there were effects of both word frequency and age of acquisition in both Chinese and English, but these item-level effects generally weakened with increasing age; (b) individual differences in phonological and orthographic awareness each contributed to successful performance; and (c) in Chinese, item-level effects were weaker for more proficient readers. We contend that our findings can be explained by theoretical models that incorporate cumulative learning as the basis for development of item-level effects in the reading system.

Visual and auditory perceptual strength norms for 3,596 French nouns and their relationship with other psycholinguistic variables

Perceptual experience plays a critical role in the conceptual representation of words. Higher levels of semantic variables such as imageability, concreteness, and sensory experience are generally associated with faster and more accurate word processing. Nevertheless, these variables tend to be assessed mostly on the basis of visual experience. This underestimates the potential contributions of other perceptual modalities. Accordingly, recent evidence has stressed the importance of providing modality-specific perceptual strength norms. In the present study, we developed French Canadian norms of visual and auditory perceptual strength (i.e., the modalities that have major impact on word processing) for 3,596 nouns. We then explored the relationship between these newly developed variables and other lexical, orthographic, and semantic variables. Finally, we demonstrated the contributions of visual and auditory perceptual strength ratings to visual word processing beyond those of other semantic variables related to perceptual experience (e.g., concreteness, imageability, and sensory experience ratings). The ratings developed in this study are a meaningful contribution toward the implementation of new studies that will shed further light on the interaction between linguistic, semantic, and perceptual systems.

Semantic and lexical features of words dissimilarly affected by non-fluent, logopenic, and semantic primary progressive aphasia

OBJECTIVE

To determine the effect of three psycholinguistic variables-lexical frequency, age of acquisition (AoA), and neighborhood density (ND)-on lexical-semantic processing in individuals with non-fluent (nfvPPA), logopenic (lvPPA), and semantic primary progressive aphasia (svPPA). Identifying the scope and independence of these features can provide valuable information about the organization of words in our mind and brain.

METHOD

We administered a lexical decision task-with words carefully selected to permit distinguishing lexical frequency, AoA, and orthographic ND effects-to 41 individuals with PPA (13 nfvPPA, 14 lvPPA, 14 svPPA) and 25 controls.

RESULTS

Of the psycholinguistic variables studied, lexical frequency had the largest influence on lexical-semantic processing, but AoA and ND also played an independent role. The results reflect a brain-language relationship with different proportional effects of frequency, AoA, and ND in the PPA variants, in a pattern that is consistent with the organization of the mental lexicon. Individuals with nfvPPA and lvPPA experienced an ND effect consistent with the role of inferior frontal and temporoparietal regions in lexical analysis and word form processing. By contrast, individuals with svPPA experienced an AoA effect consistent with the role of the anterior temporal lobe in semantic processing.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings are in line with a hierarchical mental lexicon structure with a conceptual (semantic) and a lexeme (word-form) level, such that a selective deficit at one of these levels of the mental lexicon manifests differently in lexical-semantic processing performance, consistent with the affected language-specific brain region in each PPA variant.

The Glasgow Norms: Ratings of 5,500 words on nine scales

The Glasgow Norms are a set of normative ratings for 5,553 English words on nine psycholinguistic dimensions: arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, imageability, familiarity, age of acquisition, semantic size, and gender association. The Glasgow Norms are unique in several respects. First, the corpus itself is relatively large, while simultaneously providing norms across a substantial number of lexical dimensions. Second, for any given subset of words, the same participants provided ratings across all nine dimensions (33 participants/word, on average). Third, two novel dimensions—semantic size and gender association—are included. Finally, the corpus contains a set of 379 ambiguous words that are presented either alone (e.g., toast) or with information that selects an alternative sense (e.g., toast (bread), toast (speech)). The relationships between the dimensions of the Glasgow Norms were initially investigated by assessing their correlations. In addition, a principal component analysis revealed four main factors, accounting for 82% of the variance (Visualization, Emotion, Salience, and Exposure). The validity of the Glasgow Norms was established via comparisons of our ratings to 18 different sets of current psycholinguistic norms. The dimension of size was tested with megastudy data, confirming findings from past studies that have explicitly examined this variable. Alternative senses of ambiguous words (i.e., disambiguated forms), when discordant on a given dimension, seemingly led to appropriately distinct ratings. Informal comparisons between the ratings of ambiguous words and of their alternative senses showed different patterns that likely depended on several factors (the number of senses, their relative strengths, and the rating scales themselves). Overall, the Glasgow Norms provide a valuable resource—in particular, for researchers investigating the role of word recognition in language comprehension.

Razak R, Treffers-Daller J, Yap NT, Abboud L, Talebi A, Gureghian M, Tuller L, Haman E. Age of acquisition of 299 words in seven languages: American English, Czech, Gaelic, Lebanese Arabic, Malay, Persian and Western Armenian

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.

Interactions of age of acquisition and lexical frequency effects with phonological regularity: An ERP study

Across languages, lexical frequency and age of acquisition (AoA) are important predictors of word reading that are naturally correlated, and both variables have been shown to interact with phonological regularity. Previous behavioral findings in Chinese have shown stronger regularity effects in low frequency relative to high frequency characters. Meanwhile, the arbitrary mapping hypothesis predicts stronger interference effects in late-acquired irregular words. This study examined the neural bases of these phenomena in Chinese using a delayed naming task with 480 single characters. Single-trial ERP analyses were conducted to contrast the interactions of frequency or AoA effects with phonological regularity, while controlling for the other factor. Results showed differential and significant effects of AoA and frequency at the N400 and late positive component (LPC), respectively, indicating their independence. ERP interaction patterns of frequency and regularity in Chinese were observed for the first time in the LPC time window and suggested semantic interference from sublexical units during character reading. Interaction of AoA and regularity at the N400 could be explained by the semantic hypothesis but appeared inconsistent with the arbitrary mapping hypothesis.

SUBTLEX-CAT: Subtitle word frequencies and contextual diversity for Catalan

SUBTLEX-CAT is a word frequency and contextual diversity database for Catalan, obtained from a 278-million-word corpus based on subtitles supplied from broadcast Catalan television. Like all previous SUBTLEX corpora, it comprises subtitles from films and TV series. In addition, it includes a wider range of TV shows (e.g., news, documentaries, debates, and talk shows) than has been included in most previous databases. Frequency metrics were obtained for the whole corpus, on the one hand, and only for films and fiction TV series, on the other. Two lexical decision experiments revealed that the subtitle-based metrics outperformed the previously available frequency estimates, computed from either written texts or texts from the Internet. Furthermore, the metrics obtained from the whole corpus were better predictors than the ones obtained from films and fiction TV series alone. In both experiments, the best predictor of response times and accuracy was contextual diversity.

Subjective ratings of age-of-acquisition: exploring issues of validity and rater reliability

This study aimed to investigate concerns of validity and reliability in subjective ratings of age-of-acquisition (AoA), through exploring characteristics of the individual rater. An additional aim was to validate the obtained AoA ratings against two corpora - one of child speech and one of adult speech - specifically exploring whether words over-represented in the child-speech corpus are rated with lower AoA than words characteristic of the adult-speech corpus. The results show that less than one-third of participating informants' ratings are valid and reliable. However, individuals with high familiarity with preschool-aged children provide more valid and reliable ratings, compared to individuals who do not work with or have children of their own. The results further show a significant, age-adjacent difference in rated AoA for words from the two different corpora, thus strengthening their validity. The study provides AoA data, of high specificity, for 100 child-specific and 100 adult-specific Swedish words.

MEGALEX: A megastudy of visual and auditory word recognition

Using the megastudy approach, we report a new database (MEGALEX) of visual and auditory lexical decision times and accuracy rates for tens of thousands of words. We collected visual lexical decision data for 28,466 French words and the same number of pseudowords, and auditory lexical decision data for 17,876 French words and the same number of pseudowords (synthesized tokens were used for the auditory modality). This constitutes the first large-scale database for auditory lexical decision, and the first database to enable a direct comparison of word recognition in different modalities. Different regression analyses were conducted to illustrate potential ways to exploit this megastudy database. First, we compared the proportions of variance accounted for by five word frequency measures. Second, we conducted item-level regression analyses to examine the relative importance of the lexical variables influencing performance in the different modalities (visual and auditory). Finally, we compared the similarities and differences between the two modalities. All data are freely available on our website ( https://sedufau.shinyapps.io/megalex/ ) and are searchable at www.lexique.org , inside the Open Lexique search engine.

Italian Age of Acquisition Norms for a Large Set of Words (ItAoA)

Age of acquisition (AoA) is an important psycholinguistic variable that affects the performance of healthy individuals and patients in a large variety of cognitive tasks. For this reason, it becomes more and more compelling to collect new AoA norms for a large set of stimuli in order to allow better control and manipulation of AoA in future research. An important motivation of the present study is to extend previous Italian norms by collecting AoA ratings for a much larger range of Italian words for which concreteness and semantic-affective norms are now available thus ensuring greater coverage of words varying along these dimensions. In the present study, we collected AoA ratings for 1,957 Italian content words (adjectives, nouns, and verbs), by asking healthy adult participants to estimate the age at which they thought they had learned the word in a Web survey procedure. First, we found high split-half correlation within our sample, suggesting strong internal reliability. Second, our data indicate that the ratings collected in this study are as valid and reliable as those collected in previous studies for Italian across different age populations (adult and children) and other languages. Finally, we analyzed the relation between AoA ratings and other lexical-semantic variables (e.g., word frequency, imageability, valence, arousal) and showed that these correlations were generally consistent with the correlations reported in other normative studies for Italian and other languages. Therefore, our new AoA norms are a valuable source of information for future research in the Italian language. The full database is available at the Open Science Framework (osf.io/3trg2).

Thai Norms for Name, Image, and Category Agreement, Object Familiarity, Visual Complexity, Manipulability, and Age of Acquisition for 480 Color Photographic Objects

Normative databases containing psycholinguistic variables are commonly used to aid stimulus selection for investigations into language and other cognitive processes. Norms exist for many languages, but not for Thai. The aim of the present research, therefore, was to obtain Thai normative data for the BOSS, a set of 480 high resolution color photographic images of real objects (Brodeur et al. in PLoS ONE 5(5), 2010.  https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010773 ). Norms were provided by 584 Thai university students on eight dimensions: name agreement, object familiarity, visual complexity, category agreement, image agreement, two types of manipulability (graspability and mimeability), and age of acquisition. The results revealed comparatively similar levels of name agreement to Brodeur et al. especially when unfamiliar items were factored out. The pattern of intercorrelations among the Thai psycholinguistic norms was comparable to previous studies and our cross-linguistic correlations were robust for the same set of pictures in English and French. Conjointly, the findings extend the relevancy of the BOSS to Thailand, supporting this photographic resource for investigations of language and other cognitive processes in monolingual, multilingual, and brain-impaired populations.

Subjective age-of-acquisition norms for 600 Turkish words from four age groups

The main purpose of this study was to report age-based subjective age-of-acquisition (AoA) norms for 600 Turkish words. A total of 115 children, 100 young adults, 115 middle-aged adults, and 127 older adults provided AoA estimates for 600 words on a 7-point scale. The intraclass correlations suggested high reliability, and the AoA estimates were highly correlated across the four age groups. Children gave earlier AoA estimates than the three adult groups; this was true for high-frequency as well as low-frequency words. In addition to the means and standard deviations of the AoA estimates, we report word frequency, concreteness, and imageability ratings, as well as word length measures (numbers of syllables and letters), for the 600 words as supplemental materials. The present ratings represent a potentially useful database for researchers working on lexical processing as well as other aspects of cognitive processing, such as autobiographical memory.

Portuguese Norms of Name Agreement, Concept Familiarity, Subjective Frequency and Visual Complexity for 150 Colored and Tridimensional Pictures

Pictures are complex stimuli that require a careful control of several characteristics and attributes standardized for different languages. In this work we present for the first time European Portuguese (EP) norms for name agreement, concept familiarity, subjective frequency and visual complexity for a new set of 150 colored pictures. These pictures were selected to represent exemplars of the most used semantic categories in research and to depict objects which, though familiar to the participants, were rarely used in daily life, which makes them particularly prone to speech failures such as tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states. Norms were collected from 640 EP native speakers that rated each picture in the four variables through a web-survey procedure. Results showed, as expected, that a large number of pictures in the dataset elicited a TOT response, and additionally that the ratings obtained in each of the dimensions are in line with those observed in other pictorial datasets. Norms can be freely downloaded at https://www.psi.uminho.pt/en/Research/Psycholinguistics/Pages/Databases.aspx.

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

We present a new set of subjective age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in 25 languages from five language families (Afro-Asiatic: Semitic languages; Altaic: one Turkic language: Indo-European: Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Slavic, and Romance languages; Niger-Congo: one Bantu language; Uralic: Finnic and Ugric languages). Adult native speakers reported the age at which they had learned each word. We present a comparison of the AoA ratings across all languages by contrasting them in pairs. This comparison shows a consistency in the orders of ratings across the 25 languages. The data were then analyzed (1) to ascertain how the demographic characteristics of the participants influenced AoA estimations and (2) to assess differences caused by the exact form of the target question (when did you learn vs. when do children learn this word); (3) to compare the ratings obtained in our study to those of previous studies; and (4) to assess the validity of our study by comparison with quasi-objective AoA norms derived from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI). All 299 words were judged as being acquired early (mostly before the age of 6 years). AoA ratings were associated with the raters' social or language status, but not with the raters' age or education. Parents reported words as being learned earlier, and bilinguals reported learning them later. Estimations of the age at which children learn the words revealed significantly lower ratings of AoA. Finally, comparisons with previous AoA and MB-CDI norms support the validity of the present estimations. Our AoA ratings are available for research or other purposes.

HelexKids: A word frequency database for Greek and Cypriot primary school children

In this article, we introduce HelexKids, an online written-word database for Greek-speaking children in primary education (Grades 1 to 6). The database is organized on a grade-by-grade basis, and on a cumulative basis by combining Grade 1 with Grades 2 to 6. It provides values for Zipf, frequency per million, dispersion, estimated word frequency per million, standard word frequency, contextual diversity, orthographic Levenshtein distance, and lemma frequency. These values are derived from 116 textbooks used in primary education in Greece and Cyprus, producing a total of 68,692 different word types. HelexKids was developed to assist researchers in studying language development, educators in selecting age-appropriate items for teaching, as well as writers and authors of educational books for Greek/Cypriot children. The database is open access and can be searched online at www.helexkids.org .

Lexico-semantic effects on word naming in Persian: does age of acquisition have an effect?

The age of acquisition (AoA) of a word has an effect on skilled reading performance. According to the arbitrary-mapping (AM) hypothesis, AoA effects on word naming are a consequence of arbitrary mappings between input and output in the lexical network. The AM hypothesis predicts that effects of AoA will be observed when words have unpredictable orthography-to-phonology (OP) mappings. The Persian writing system is characterized by a degree of consistency between OP mappings, making words transparent. However, the omission of vowels in the script used by skilled readers makes the OP mappings of many words unpredictable or opaque. In this study, we used factor analysis to test which lexico-semantic variables, including AoA, predict the reading aloud of monosyllabic Persian words with different spelling transparencies (transparent or opaque). Linear mixed-effect regression analysis revealed that a Lexical factor (loading on word familiarity, spoken frequency, and written frequency) and a Semantic factor (loading on AoA, imageability, and familiarity) significantly predict word-naming latencies in Persian. Further analysis revealed a significant interaction between AoA and transparency, with larger effects of AoA for opaque than for transparent words and a significant interaction between imageability and AoA on reading opaque words; that is, AoA effects are more pronounced for low-imageability opaque words than for high-imageability opaque words. Interactions between these factors and spelling transparency suggest that late-acquired opaque words receive greater input from the semantic reading route. Implications for understanding the AoA effects on word naming in Persian are discussed.

Experience with compound words influences their processing: An eye movement investigation with English compound words

Recording eye movements provides information on the time-course of word recognition during reading. Juhasz and Rayner [Juhasz, B. J., & Rayner, K. (2003). Investigating the effects of a set of intercorrelated variables on eye fixation durations in reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 29, 1312-1318] examined the impact of five word recognition variables, including familiarity and age-of-acquisition (AoA), on fixation durations. All variables impacted fixation durations, but the time-course differed. However, the study focused on relatively short, morphologically simple words. Eye movements are also informative for examining the processing of morphologically complex words such as compound words. The present study further examined the time-course of lexical and semantic variables during morphological processing. A total of 120 English compound words that varied in familiarity, AoA, semantic transparency, lexeme meaning dominance, sensory experience rating (SER), and imageability were selected. The impact of these variables on fixation durations was examined when length, word frequency, and lexeme frequencies were controlled in a regression model. The most robust effects were found for familiarity and AoA, indicating that a reader's experience with compound words significantly impacts compound recognition. These results provide insight into semantic processing of morphologically complex words during reading.

Judging the animacy of words: The influence of typicality and age of acquisition in a semantic decision task

The age at which members of a semantic category are learned (age of acquisition), the typicality they demonstrate within their corresponding category, and the semantic domain to which they belong (living, non-living) are known to influence the speed and accuracy of lexical/semantic processing. So far, only a few studies have looked at the origin of age of acquisition and its interdependence with typicality and semantic domain within the same experimental design. Twenty adult participants performed an animacy decision task in which nouns were classified according to their semantic domain as being living or non-living. Response times were influenced by the independent main effects of each parameter: typicality, age of acquisition, semantic domain, and frequency. However, there were no interactions. The results are discussed with respect to recent models concerning the origin of age of acquisition effects.

A Maltese adaptation of the Boston Naming Test: A shortened version

The Boston Naming Test (BNT) is the most widely used naming test worldwide in research and clinical settings. This study aimed to develop a method for adapting the BNT to suit different linguistic and cultural characteristics using the example of Maltese in a bilingual context. In addition, it investigated the effects in Malta of age and level of education on naming performance. The words of the BNT were first translated into Maltese. The test was then piloted to establish target and alternative responses. Naming performance data were later collected from individuals of different ages and levels of education. Only 38 BNT items had at least 70% name agreement. Main effects of age and education were found. A Maltese adaptation was proposed using 38 items and lenient scoring. Similar procedures may be used in other bilingual populations. The study suggests that normative data should be stratified according to age and education.

A database of 629 English compound words: ratings of familiarity, lexeme meaning dominance, semantic transparency, age of acquisition, imageability, and sensory experience

Since the work of Taft and Forster (1976), a growing literature has examined how English compound words are recognized and organized in the mental lexicon. Much of this research has focused on whether compound words are decomposed during recognition by manipulating the word frequencies of their lexemes. However, many variables may impact morphological processing, including relational semantic variables such as semantic transparency, as well as additional form-related and semantic variables. In the present study, ratings were collected on 629 English compound words for six variables [familiarity, age of acquisition (AoA), semantic transparency, lexeme meaning dominance (LMD), imageability, and sensory experience ratings (SER)]. All of the compound words selected for this study are contained within the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007), which made it possible to use a regression approach to examine the predictive power of these variables for lexical decision and word naming performance. Analyses indicated that familiarity, AoA, imageability, and SER were all significant predictors of both lexical decision and word naming performance when they were added separately to a model containing the length and frequency of the compounds, as well as the lexeme frequencies. In addition, rated semantic transparency also predicted lexical decision performance. The database of English compound words should be beneficial to word recognition researchers who are interested in selecting items for experiments on compound words, and it will also allow researchers to conduct further analyses using the available data combined with word recognition times included in the English Lexicon Project.