Age of acquisition, not word frequency, affects object naming, not object recognition

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Word frequency is traditionally considered a key factor influencing object naming speed.
• However, recent research suggests age of acquisition might be a more significant determinant, potentially making frequency effects redundant.

Purpose of the Study:

• To re-evaluate the role of word frequency versus age of acquisition in object naming speed.
• To investigate the influence of various linguistic and semantic variables on naming speed through new experimental paradigms.

Main Methods:

• Reanalysis of the Oldfield and Wingfield (1965) dataset on object naming.
• Two new experiments were conducted, manipulating variables such as age of acquisition, phoneme length, frequency, prototypicality, imageability, and semantic category.

Main Results:

• Reanalysis indicated age of acquisition as the primary determinant, with word frequency playing no independent role.
• Experiment 1 found age of acquisition and phoneme length to be key factors, while frequency, prototypicality, and imageability had no independent effect.
• Experiment 2 revealed prototypicality and semantic category as significant predictors of reaction time, with no influence from age of acquisition or word frequency.

Conclusions:

• Age of acquisition, rather than word frequency, is the critical factor affecting object name retrieval and execution.
• The findings suggest that early learned words might be more resilient to neurological damage, particularly in cases of adult aphasia.