scholarly journals The Role of Context on Age of Acquisition Effect

2018 ◽  
pp. 19-48
Author(s):  
Ilhan Raman
Keyword(s):  
Word Frequency ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Age Of Acquisition ◽  
Word Naming ◽  
Frequency Effect ◽  
Strategic Control ◽  
Word Frequency Effect ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Transparent Orthography

Processes involved in converting print to sound are reported to be flexible and under the strategic control of skilled readers even in transparent orthographies. In this respect, word frequency effect, regularity, and lexicality have been the topic of much research and debate in understanding how context is involved in the emergence of strategies. However, whether age of acquisition (AoA) effects are influenced by context and under the strategic control of readers have yet to be established. A series of single-word naming experiments addresses this issue and examines the role of filler type critically manipulated on lexicality, frequency, and imageability on the size of AoA effect in word naming in an entirely transparent orthography. Overall, results, which are discussed within the current theoretical frameworks, suggest that context plays a significant role on AoA.

Demythologizing the word frequency effect

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 436-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. H. Baayen
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Word Frequency ◽  
Computational Models ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Frequency Effect ◽  
Word Frequency Effect ◽  
Predictors Of Response ◽  
Dual Route ◽  
Dual Route Model

This study starts from the hypothesis, first advanced by McDonald and Shillcock (2001), that the word frequency effect for a large part reflects local syntactic co-occurrence. It is shown that indeed the word frequency effect in the sense of pure repeated exposure accounts for only a small proportion of the variance in lexical decision, and that local syntactic and morphological co-occurrence probabilities are what makes word frequency a powerful predictor for lexical decision latencies. A comparison of two computational models, the cascaded dual route model (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001) and the Naive Discriminative Reader (Baayen, Milin, Filipovic Durdjevic, Hendrix, & Marelli, 2010), indicates that only the latter model properly captures the quantitative weight of the latent dimensions of lexical variation as predictors of response times. Computational models that account for frequency of occurrence by some mechanism equivalent to a counter in the head therefore run the risk of overestimating the role of frequency as repetition, of overestimating the importance of words’ form properties, and of underestimating the importance of contextual learning during past experience in proficient reading.

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