Age of acquisition


Age of acquisition, is a psycholinguistic variable referring to the age at which a word is typically learned. For example, the word 'penguin' is typically learned at a younger age than the word 'albatros'. Studies in psycholinguistics suggest that age of acquisition has an effect on the speed of reading words. It is a particularly strong variable in predicting the speed of picture naming. It has been generally found that words that are more frequent, shorter, more familiar and refer to concrete concepts are learned earlier than more complex words.

Norms

Sets of normative values for age of acquisition for large sets of words have been developed.
It has been disputed whether age of acquisition has an effect on word tasks on its own or by virtue of its covariance with other variables such as word frequency. Alternatively, it has been suggested that the age of acquisition is related to the fact that an earlier learned word has been encountered more often. These issues were partially resolved in an article by Ghyselinck, Lewis and Brysbaert.
Alternatively there have been discussions of the effect that the age of acquisition has on learning a second language.