Age of acquisition's effect on memory for semantically associated word pairs

Abstract

This experiment investigated the effects of age of acquisition (AoA) in memory for associated word pairs in a cued recall task. Participants studied a list of frequency-controlled early- and late-acquired words in semantically related pairs and then were asked to recall the second word of the pair when cued with the first. Reaction time effects were found, showing that a late-acquired cue for an early-acquired target word was responded to significantly faster than other combinations. Additionally, late-acquired target words resulted in significantly more accurate responses. As significant differences were found even when frequency was controlled, the effects must therefore stem from the manipulations of AoA. Given this evidence, the implications for AoA's effects on the organization of semantic memory are explored.

Keywords:

• Age of acquisition
• Semantic memory
• Recall
• World frequency
• Lexical processing.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Melanie Cherng and Sarah Taylor for their help with data collection. We would also like to thank Marc Brysbaert and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. Finally, we would like to thank Jerry Myers for suggesting the use of the Perlmutter, Harsip, and Myers (1976) paradigm to explore the role of age of acquisition in the semantic system.

Notes

1 Cue words were also entered into the Edinburgh Association Thesaurus (Kiss, Armstrong, Milroy, & Piper, 1973), and the number of participants who provided the target word as the first associate was recorded. A total of 11 of the 48 cue words were not contained in the Edinburgh corpus. If the target word was not ever provided as a first associate to the cue word according to the Edinburgh corpus, this was scored as a zero. The number of participants who produced the target as the first associate to the cue word according to the Edinburgh corpus did not significantly differ as a function of cue or target word AoA (ps > .15).

2 Note that in the Steyvers and Tenenbaum (2005) model, an interaction between frequency and AoA in the number of connections that a given word obtains is reported, such that the AoA effect on number of connections is greatest for nodes with the highest utility. However, both variables also have main effects whereby the AoA effect holds for all frequencies, and the frequency effect holds for various AoAs.