Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
10458100 | Cognition | 2005 | 10 Pages |
Abstract
In many tasks the effects of frequency and age of acquisition (AoA) on reaction latencies are similar in size. However, in picture naming the AoA-effect is often significantly larger than expected on the basis of the frequency-effect. Previous explanations of this frequency-independent AoA-effect have attributed it to the organisation of the semantic system or to the way phonological word forms are stored in the mental lexicon. Using a semantic blocking paradigm, we show that semantic context effects on naming latencies are more pronounced for late-acquired than for early-acquired words. This interaction between AoA and naming context is likely to arise during lexical-semantic encoding, which we put forward as the locus for the frequency-independent AoA-effect.
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Authors
Eva Belke, Marc Brysbaert, Antje S. Meyer, Mandy Ghyselinck,