Age-of-Acquisition, Word Frequency, and Neighborhood Density Effects on Spoken Word Recognition by Children and Adults

Abstract

This study assessed how lexical factors associated with vocabulary growth influence spoken word recognition by preschoolers, elementary-school children, and adults. Word frequency effects in gating and word repetition tasks were minimal, whereas age-of-acquisition and neighborhood density effects were found for all listeners. For word repetition, children displayed more of an advantage for the recognition of early-acquired items from sparse vs dense neighborhoods than did adults; adults showed a greater advantage for the recognition of later-acquired items. Regression analyses revealed that the recognition of early-acquired items from sparse neighborhoods contributed to phonological awareness among individual children. In turn, phonological awareness, receptive vocabulary, and verbal short-term memory contributed to word reading. These findings are discussed in terms of recent proposals about the level of processing at which neighborhood density exerts either facilitatory or inhibitory effects. The development of phonological awareness and early reading skill is also discussed.