Forgetting "Novel" but Not "Dragon": The Role of Age of Acquisition on Intentional and Incidental Forgetting

Discourse-Level Information Recall in Early and Late Bilinguals: Evidence From Single-Language and Cross-Linguistic Tasks

Bilingualism research indicates that verbal memory skills are sensitive to age of second language (L2) acquisition (AoA). However, most tasks employ disconnected, decontextualized stimuli, undermining ecological validity. Here, we assessed whether AoA impacts the ability to recall information from naturalistic discourse in single-language and cross-linguistic tasks. Twenty-four early and 25 late Chinese-English bilinguals listened to real-life L2 newscasts and orally reproduced their information in English (Task 1) and Chinese (Task 2). Both groups were compared in terms of recalled information (presence and correctness of idea units) and key control measures (e.g., attentional skills, speech rate). Across both tasks, information completeness was higher for early than late bilinguals. This occurred irrespective of attentional speed, speech rate, and additional relevant factors. Such results bridge the gap between classical memory paradigms and ecological designs in bilingualism research, illuminating how particular language profiles shape information processing in daily communicative scenarios.

Age of acquisition effects in recognition without identification tasks

The Age of Acquisition (AoA) effect results in early-acquired words being processed more quickly and accurately than later-acquired words. This effect is argued to result from a gradual development of semantic representations and a changing neural network throughout development (Chang, Y.-N., Monaghan, P., & Welbourne, S., 2019). Some forms of the Recognition Without Identification (RWI) effects have been observed at a perceptual level. The present study used the RWI paradigm to examine whether the AoA effect is located at the perceptual loci. A total of 174 participants were presented a list of pictures (Experiment 1) or words (Experiment 2) followed by a list of mixed early- and late-acquired picture or word fragments that participants had to identify; half of which corresponded to studied words and half of which to unstudied words. Irrespective of whether the item was identified, participants then rated the likelihood that the item appeared in the study phase. In both experiments, results showed that studied items were recognised more accurately than unstudied items, even when they could not be identified and late-acquired items were recognised more than early-acquired items, even when they were not identified. Finally, RWI interacted with the AoA effect only in pictorial stimuli, suggesting that the RWI and AoA effects are located at the perceptual level.

The Croatian psycholinguistic database: Estimates for 6000 nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs

Psycholinguistic databases containing ratings of concreteness, imageability, age of acquisition, and subjective frequency are used in psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies which require words as stimuli. Linguistic characteristics (e.g. word length, corpus frequency) are frequently coded, but word class is seldom systematically treated, although there are indications of its significance for imageability and concreteness. This paper presents the Croatian Psycholinguistic Database (CPD; available at: https://doi.org/10.17234/megahr.2019.hpb ), containing 6000 Croatian nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, rated for concreteness, imageability, age of acquisition, and subjective frequency. Moreover, we present computationally obtained extrapolations of concreteness and imageability to the remainder of the Croatian lexicon (available at: https://github.com/megahr/lexicon/blob/master/predictions/hr_c_i.predictions.txt ). In the two studies presented here, we explore the significance of word class for concreteness and imageability in human and computationally obtained ratings. The observed correlations in the CPD indicate correspondences between psycholinguistic measures expected from the literature. Word classes exhibit differences in subjective frequency, age of acquisition, concreteness and imageability, with significant differences between nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. In the computational study which focused on concreteness and imageability, concreteness obtained higher correlations with human ratings than imageability, and the system underpredicted the concreteness of nouns, and overpredicted the concreteness of adjectives and adverbs. Overall, this suggests that word class contains schematic conceptual and distributional information. Schematic conceptual content seems to be more significant in human ratings of concreteness and less significant in computationally obtained ratings, where distributional information seems to play a more significant role. This suggests that word class differences should be theoretically explored.

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.