Abstract
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).
Highlights
Age of acquisition (AoA) represents the age at which a word is learned
We provide other lexical measures related to the AoA of words and we explore the relation between AoA and other linguistic and semantic variables known to influence the processing of word meaning (Montefinese and Vinson, 2015; Montefinese et al, 2015)
The normative data include values of AoA for 1,957 Italian words provided by 507 native Italian speakers
Summary
Age of acquisition (AoA) represents the age at which a word is learned. This measure has been shown to affect performance in a large variety of cognitive tasks (see reviews by Juhasz, 2005; Johnston and Barry, 2006; Brysbaert and Ellis, 2016), with faster reaction times for words learned early in life compared with those learned later. The network plasticity hypothesis suggests that learning of new words is not constant and is accompanied by a gradual decline over time in the plasticity of the network responsible for learning patterns and associations, resulting in less efficient learning for later-acquired words (Ellis and Lambon Ralph, 2000). This general account of AoA effect as not specific of a particular domain (e.g., orthography, phonology, semantics) is compatible with aspects of several theoretical frameworks. Words with lower AoA have more connections and are used more often compared to later-acquired words, making their retrieval easier (see the cumulative frequency hypothesis by Zevin and Seidenberg, 2004)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
