Late-acquired Words Research Articles

Spelling-sound consistency influences second-language age of acquisition effect: evidence for the arbitrary mapping hypothesis

ABSTRACT The age at which people acquire a word influences word recognition, known as the age of acquisition (AoA) effect. In the first language (L1), AoA effects are widely found in various languages and experimental tasks. Arbitrary Mapping Hypothesis proposes that AoA effects reflect the loss of network plasticity during the learning of mappings between input and output representations. It predicts that the AoA effect appears (or is larger) when the input-output mapping is arbitrary/inconsistent, relative to consistent input-output mapping. The present study examined how these predictions generalised to the second language (L2). We explored whether the L2 AoA effect was modulated by spelling-sound consistency in Chinese-English bilinguals, adopting a delayed word naming task. The results showed that the mapping consistency modulated the L2 AoA effect on the N170, P200 and N400 components. L2 AoA effect was insignificant in the consistent condition but was significant in the inconsistent condition: late-acquired words elicited larger N170, smaller P200, and larger N400 compared to early-acquired words. These findings suggest that L2 AoA effects occur in the spelling-sound connections, providing direct evidence for the Arbitrary Mapping Hypothesis.

Recall of Vocabulary from a Second Language: Picture Naming vs. Word Definition

The present study investigated the differences between early and late-acquired words from a second language in terms of the method of recall, speed and accuracy. This involved comparing the performance of 24 native Arabic participants on two different recall methods: picture naming vs. word definition. Each participant attended two sessions, with a 24-hour interval: a learning session, in which they learned new words, and a retrieval session, in which they performed the picture-naming and word-definition tasks while their ERP signals were recorded. The main results showed a significant main effect of age of acquisition on both accuracy and reaction time. Additionally, the N400 ERP component showed a significant interaction between age of acquisition and method of recall in the N400 values recorded in the left frontal area. Together, these findings indicate that both accuracy and reaction time measures can detect differences between early and late-acquired words, recalled through either a picture-naming or word-definition task.

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.

Two words as one: A multi-naming investigation of the age-of-acquisition effect in compound-word processing

Previous research has shown that early-acquired words are produced faster than late-acquired words. Juhasz and colleagues (Juhasz, Lai & Woodcock, Behavior Research Methods, 47 (4), 1004-1019, 2015; Juhasz, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-10, 2018) argue that the Age-of-Acquisition (AoA) loci for complex words, specifically compound words, are found at the lexical/semantic level. In the current study, two experiments were conducted to evaluate this claim and investigate the influence of AoA in reading compound words aloud. In Experiment 1, 48 participants completed a word naming task. Using general linear mixed modelling, we found that the age at which the compound word was learned significantly affected the naming latencies beyond the other psycholinguistic properties measured. The second experiment required 48 participants to name the compound word when the two morphemes were presented with a space in-between (combinatorial naming, e.g. air plane). We found that the age at which the compound word was learned, as well as the AoA of the individual morphemes that formed the compound word, significantly influenced combinatorial naming latency. These findings are discussed in relation to theories of the AoA in language processing.

Implementing Evidence-Based Practice: Selecting Treatment Words to Boost Phonological Learning.

Word selection has typically been thought of as an inactive ingredient in phonological treatment, but emerging evidence suggests that word selection is an active ingredient that can impact phonological learning. The goals of this tutorial are to (a) review the emerging single-subject evidence on the influence of word characteristics on phonological learning in clinical treatment, (b) outline hypotheses regarding the mechanism of action of word characteristics, and (c) provide resources to support clinicians incorporating word selection as an active ingredient in their approach to phonological treatment. Research demonstrating the influence of the word frequency, neighborhood density, age of acquisition, and lexicality of treatment stimuli on phonological learning is summarized. The mechanism of action for each characteristic is hypothesized. Methods from the research studies are used to create a free set of evidence-based treatment materials targeting most of the mid-8 and late-8 consonants. Clinicians have numerous evidence-based options to consider when selecting stimuli for phonological treatment including (a) high-frequency and high-density words, (b) low-frequency and high-density words, (c) high-frequency and mixed-density words, (d) low-frequency and late-acquired words, and (e) nonwords. Incorporating word characteristics into phonological treatment may boost phonological learning. http://hdl.handle.net/1808/24768.

Vocabulary Facilitates Speech Perception in Children With Hearing Aids.

We examined the effects of vocabulary, lexical characteristics (age of acquisition and phonotactic probability), and auditory access (aided audibility and daily hearing aid [HA] use) on speech perception skills in children with HAs. Participants included 24 children with HAs and 25 children with normal hearing (NH), ages 5-12 years. Groups were matched on age, expressive and receptive vocabulary, articulation, and nonverbal working memory. Participants repeated monosyllabic words and nonwords in noise. Stimuli varied on age of acquisition, lexical frequency, and phonotactic probability. Performance in each condition was measured by the signal-to-noise ratio at which the child could accurately repeat 50% of the stimuli. Children from both groups with larger vocabularies showed better performance than children with smaller vocabularies on nonwords and late-acquired words but not early-acquired words. Overall, children with HAs showed poorer performance than children with NH. Auditory access was not associated with speech perception for the children with HAs. Children with HAs show deficits in sensitivity to phonological structure but appear to take advantage of vocabulary skills to support speech perception in the same way as children with NH. Further investigation is needed to understand the causes of the gap that exists between the overall speech perception abilities of children with HAs and children with NH.

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

Two experiments studied how the age at which words are acquired (Age of Acquisition, AoA) modulates forgetting. Experiment 1 employed the retrieval-practice paradigm to test the effect of AoA on the incidental forgetting that emerges after solving competition during retrieval (i.e., retrieval-induced forgetting, RIF). Standard RIF appeared with late-acquired words, but this effect disappeared with early-acquired words. Experiment 2 evaluated the effect of AoA on intentional forgetting by employing the list-method directed forgetting paradigm. Results showed a standard directed forgetting effect only when the to-be-forgotten words were late-acquired words. These findings point to the prominent role of AoA in forgetting processes.

Word recognition in Alzheimer's disease: Effects of semantic degeneration.

Impairments of word recognition in Alzheimer's disease (AD) have been less widely investigated than impairments affecting word retrieval and production. In particular, we know little about what makes individual words easier or harder for patients with AD to recognize. We used a lexical selection task in which participants were shown sets of four items, each set consisting of one word and three non-words. The task was simply to point to the word on each trial. Forty patients with mild-to-moderate AD were significantly impaired on this task relative to matched controls who made very few errors. The number of patients with AD able to recognize each word correctly was predicted by the frequency, age of acquisition, and imageability of the words, but not by their length or number of orthographic neighbours. Patient Mini-Mental State Examination and phonological fluency scores also predicted the number of words recognized. We propose that progressive degradation of central semantic representations in AD differentially affects the ability to recognize low-imageability, low-frequency, late-acquired words, with the same factors affecting word recognition as affecting word retrieval.

First learned words are not forgotten: Age-of-acquisition effects in the tip-of-the-tongue experience.

A large body of evidence indicates that the age at which a word is acquired predicts the time required to retrieve that word during speech production. Here we explored whether age of acquisition also predicts the experience of being unable to produce a known word at a particular moment. Italian speakers named a sequence of pictures in Experiment 1 or retrieved a word as a response to a definition in Experiment 2. In both experiments, the participants were instructed to indicate when they were in a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state. Generalized mixed-effects models performed on the TOT and correct responses revealed that word frequency and age of acquisition predicted the TOT states. Specifically, low-frequency words elicited more TOTs than did high-frequency words, replicating previous findings. In addition, late-acquired words elicited more TOTs than did early-acquired words. Further analyses revealed that the age of acquisition was a better predictor of TOTs than was word frequency. The effects of age of acquisition were similar with subjective and objective measures of age of acquisition, and persisted when several psycholinguistic variables were taken into consideration as predictors in the generalized mixed-effects models. We explained these results in terms of weaker semantic-to-phonological connections in the speech production system for late-acquired words.

Event-Related Brain Potentials During Picture Naming, Using Early and Late Acquired Words

Background: Naming is a simple and basic skill of the language which involves semantic, lexical, and phonological levels. There are many different factors affecting the speed and convenience of naming. One of these factors is the word Age of Acquisition (AoA) and since language processing occurs at an extremely fast rate, psycholinguistics needs a method that has very good temporal resolution. The Eventrelated Brain Potentials (ERP) method is almost ideal among the imaging techniques of studying a language. Objectives: The current study aimed to investigate the electroencephalograph signals related to the time period of phonological encoding during immediate picture naming through the analysis of AoA effect. Patients and Methods: In this cross-sectional study 15 male, native Farsi speakers, aged 18 - 25 years participated. The test involved naming 80 pictures including 40 early-acquired words and 40 late-acquired words, presented by a monitor screen. EEG (electroencephalogram) was recorded continuously from 64 electrodes mounted on an electrode cap. The waves related to early and late-acquired groups were investigated in terms of amplitude, latency, and scalp distribution within a 300 millisecond time range linked to phonological encoding process. Results: The results showed that the pictures of the early-acquired words were named 40 millisecond faster than those of late-acquired words (P = 0.022). The difference between the two groups was significant on the latency and scalp distribution, but not significant on amplitude. Conclusions: According to the results of the study, AoA modulated response latencies (early acquired words were produced faster than late-acquired ones), indicating increased processing time-cost for late acquired words, which happens during the phonological encoding period (phonological code retrieval and syllabification). Furthermore, the results seem to support a phonological encoding locus for the main AoA effects.

Age of acquisition predicts rate of lexical evolution

The processes taking place during language acquisition are proposed to influence language evolution. However, evidence demonstrating the link between language learning and language evolution is, at best, indirect, constituting studies of laboratory-based artificial language learning studies or computational simulations of diachronic change. In the current study, a direct link between acquisition and evolution is established, showing that for two hundred fundamental vocabulary items, the age at which words are acquired is a predictor of the rate at which they have changed in studies of language evolution. Early-acquired words are more salient and easier to process than late-acquired words, and these early-acquired words are also more stably represented within the community’s language. Analysing the properties of these early-acquired words potentially provides insight into the origins of communication, highlighting features of words that have been ultra-conserved in language.

Exploring the multiple-level hypothesis of AoA effects in spoken and written object naming using a topographic ERP analysis

Here we tested the multiple-loci hypothesis of age-of-acquisition effects in both spoken and handwritten object naming using Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) and spatiotemporal segmentation analysis. Participants had to say aloud or write down picture names that varied on frequency trajectory (age-of-acquisition). Early-acquired words yielded shorter naming times than late-acquired words in both spoken and written naming. More importantly, AoA modulated ERPs only during a later time-window in both output modalities: waveforms started to diverge around 400ms, which corresponded to the end of a period of topographic stability starting at around 260ms in both conditions. These stable electrophysiological maps lasted longer in the late than in the early-acquired condition and shifted the onset of the following periods of stable electrophysiological activity. Taken together, the findings are at odds with the multiple loci hypothesis, but support the hypothesis that AoA affects a single encoding level, namely the word-form encoding process.

Since when or how often? Dissociating the roles of age of acquisition (AoA) and lexical frequency in early visual word processing

The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of both word age of acquisition (AoA) and frequency of occurrence on the timing and topographical distribution of ERP components. The processing of early- versus late-acquired words was compared with that of high-frequency versus low-frequency words. Participants were asked to perform an orthographic task while EEG was recorded from 128 sites. RTs showed an effect of both word AoA and lexical frequency. ERPs revealed a neuro-functional dissociation between AoA and frequency effects in early word processing. AoA modulated the amplitude of left occipito-temporal selection-negativity, suggesting an effect of AoA on early orthographic and lexical access and revealing the crucial role of AoA in determining how words are neurally represented in the ventral pathway. Lexical frequency modulated the amplitude of left anterior negativity, providing evidence for the involvement of the left inferior frontal cortex in the processing of low-frequency words.

Effects of Age-of-Acquisition in the Word-Fragment Completion Task

Barry, Hirsh, Johnston, and Williams (2001) found that Age-of-Acquisition (AoA) interacted with repetition priming in the picture naming task (greater priming for late- than for early-acquired words), and proposed that AoA might affect the stage of access to lexical-phonological representations. The present experiment examined the possibility that AoA may influence the retrieval of visual-orthographic information, by studying its effects in the Word-Fragment Completion Task (WFCT). Results showed that the overall percentages of correct completion were greater for early- than for late-acquired words, while repetition priming was higher for late- than for early-acquired items. Furthermore, the interaction between AoA and WFCT priming remained significant even when the fragments were exposed for only 4 s, reducing possible contributions from phonological and semantic processes. These findings suggest that AoA can affect implicit memory by facilitating the retrieval of the orthographic properties of the studied words.

Age-of-acquisition affects word naming in Italian only when stress is irregular

In Italian, effects of age of acquisition (AoA) have been found in object naming, semantic categorization of words and lexical decision, but not in word naming (reading aloud). The lack of an AoA effect in Italian word naming is replicated in Experiment 1 which involved reading aloud two-syllable words which all have regular spelling–sound correspondences and regular stress patterns. Studies of English word naming have reported stronger effects of AoA for irregular or exception words than for words with regular, consistent spelling–sound correspondences. There are no grapheme–phoneme irregularities in Italian, but words containing three or more syllables can carry either regular stress on the penultimate syllable or irregular stress on the antepenultimate syllable. Experiment 2 found effects of AoA on reading three-syllable words for words with irregular stress. The results are interpreted in terms of the ‘mapping hypothesis’ of AoA, with effects arising as a result of a difficulty to generalize earlier-acquired patterns to irregular late-acquired words.

Independent Distractor Frequency and Age-of-Acquisition Effects in Picture–Word Interference: fMRI Evidence for Post-lexical and Lexical Accounts according to Distractor Type

In two fMRI experiments, participants named pictures with superimposed distractors that were high or low in frequency or varied in terms of age of acquisition. Pictures superimposed with low-frequency words were named more slowly than those superimposed with high-frequency words, and late-acquired words interfered with picture naming to a greater extent than early-acquired words. The distractor frequency effect (Experiment 1) was associated with increased activity in left premotor and posterior superior temporal cortices, consistent with the operation of an articulatory response buffer and verbal self-monitoring system. Conversely, the distractor age-of-acquisition effect (Experiment 2) was associated with increased activity in the left middle and posterior middle temporal cortex, consistent with the operation of lexical level processes such as lemma and phonological word form retrieval. The spatially dissociated patterns of activity across the two experiments indicate that distractor effects in picture-word interference may occur at lexical or postlexical levels of processing in speech production.

Age-of-Acquisition Effects in Pure Alexia

Pure alexia is an acquired reading disorder in which previously literate adults adopt a letter-by-letter processing strategy. Though these individuals display impaired reading, research shows that they are still able to use certain lexical information in order to facilitate visual word processing. The current experiment investigates the role that a word's age of acquisition (AoA) plays in the reading processes of an individual with pure alexia (G.J.) when other lexical variables have been controlled. Results from a sentence reading task in which eye movement patterns were recorded indicated that G.J. shows a strong effect of AoA, where late-acquired words are more difficult to process than early-acquired words. Furthermore, it was observed that the AoA effect is much greater for G.J. than for age-matched control participants. This indicates that patients with pure alexia rely heavily on intact top-down information, supporting the interactive activation model of reading.

Comparing Electrophysiological Correlates of Word Production in Immediate and Delayed Naming Through the Analysis of Word Age of Acquisition Effects

Most EEG studies analysing speech production with event related brain potential (ERP) have adopted silent metalinguistic tasks or delayed or tacit picture naming in order to avoid possible artefacts during motor preparation. A central issue in the interpretation of these results is whether the processes involved in those tasks are comparable to those involved in overt speech production. In the present study we addressed a methodological issue about the integration of stimulus-aligned and response-aligned ERPs in immediate overt picture naming in comparison to delayed production, coupled with a theoretical point on the effect of word Age of Acquisition (AoA). High density EEG recordings were used and waveform analyses and spatio-temporal segmentation were combined on stimulus-aligned and response-aligned ERPs. The same sequence and duration of topographic maps appeared in the immediate and delayed production until around 350 ms after picture onset, revealing similar encoding processes until the beginning of phonological encoding, but modulations linked to word AoA were only observed in the immediate production. Considering stimulus-aligned and response-aligned ERPs together allowed to identify that a stable topography starting around 350 ms lasts 30 ms longer for late-acquired than for early-acquired words. This difference falls within the time-window of phonological encoding and its modulation can be linked to the longer production latencies for late-acquired words.

Modeling reading development: Cumulative, incremental learning in a computational model of word naming

Natural reading development gradually builds up to the adult vocabulary over a period of years. This has an effect on lexical processing: early-acquired words are processed more quickly and more accurately than later-acquired words. We present a connectionist model of reading, learning to map orthography onto phonology to simulate this natural reading development. The model learned early words more robustly than late words, and also showed interactions between age of acquisition and spelling-sound consistency that have been reported for skilled adult readers. In additional simulations, we demonstrated that age of acquisition effects are a consequence of incremental exposure to words in concert with changes in plasticity as learning proceeds, and are not due to uncontrolled differences in ease of reading between early and late-acquired words. Models which do not learn through cumulative training are unable to explain age of acquisition and related effects.

Age of Acquisition, Word Frequency, and Picture–Word Interference

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.