Imageability and age of acquisition effects in disyllabic word recognition

Abstract

Imageability and age of acquisition (AoA) effects, as well as key interactions between these variables and frequency and consistency, were examined via multiple regression analyses for 1,936 disyllabic words, using reaction time and accuracy measures from the English Lexicon Project. Both imageability and AoA accounted for unique variance in lexical decision and naming reaction time performance. In addition, across both tasks, AoA and imageability effects were larger for low-frequency words than high-frequency words, and imageability effects were larger for later acquired than earlier acquired words. In reading aloud, consistency effects in reaction time were larger for later acquired words than earlier acquired words, but consistency did not interact with imageability in the reaction time analysis. These results provide further evidence that multisyllabic word recognition is similar to monosyllabic word recognition and indicate that AoA and imageability are valid predictors of word recognition performance. In addition, the results indicate that meaning exerts a larger influence in the reading aloud of multisyllabic words than monosyllabic words. Finally, parallel-distributed-processing approaches provide a useful theoretical framework to explain the main effects and interactions.

Keywords:

• Imageability
• Age of acquisition
• Word recognition
• Polysyllabic

Notes

¹ We would like to thank Melvin Yap for providing the consistency information for the word corpus used in these analyses.

² We note that in our 1,936 word sample, frequency trajectory correlates with AoA, r = –.299, p < .01. We conducted another set of 8-step hierarchical regression analyses where, in Step 3, subtitle frequency was replaced by the cumulative frequency measure and frequency trajectory measure defined by Zevin and Seidenberg (2004), and imageability and AoA were assessed in Step 8. The pattern of significance for imageability and AoA did not change from the original results. In addition, cumulative frequency predicted performance in every case, and frequency trajectory was not related to performance except that it was negatively related to lexical decision accuracy. That is, words more frequent later in development were decided on more accurately than words more frequent early in development.