Age of Acquisition Ratings

Authors: Marc BrysbaertHans Stadthagen-GonzalezVictor Kuperman
Updated: Fri 24 November 2017
Source: http://crr.ugent.be/archives/806
Type: database
Languages: English
Keywords: lexiconword-recognitionage-of-acquisitionlinguistics
Open Access: yes
License: CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Publications: Kuperman, V., Stadthagen-Gonzalez, H., & Brysbaert, M. (2012).; Brysbaert, M. & Biemiller, A. (2017).
Citation: Kuperman, V., Stadthagen-Gonzalez, H., & Brysbaert, M. (2012). Age-of-acquisition ratings for 30 thousand English words. Behavior Research Methods. 44, 978-990. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-012-0210-4
Summary:

We present age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 30,121 English content words (nouns, verbs, and adjectives). For data collection, this mega-study used the web-based crowdsourcing technology offered by the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our data indicate that the ratings collected in this way are as valid and reliable as those collected in laboratory conditions (the correlation between our ratings and those collected in the lab from US students reached 0.93 for a subsample of 2,500 monosyllabic words). We also show that our AoA ratings explain a substantial percentage of variance in the lexical decision data of the English Lexicon Project over and above the effects of log frequency, word length, and similarity to other words. This is true not only for the lemmas used in our rating study, but also for their inflected forms. We further discuss the relationships of AoA with other predictors of word recognition and illustrate the utility of AoA ratings for research on vocabulary growth.