Subjective age of acquisition norms for 30,849 Russian words

Age of acquisition (AoA) is a key psycholinguistic variable known to influence lexical and conceptual processing across a broad range of tasks. However, existing Russian datasets are small and mainly limited to picturable nouns and verbs. In this study, we collected AoA ratings for 30,849 Russian words that represent a broad vocabulary range. Ratings were collected from 2,201 adult respondents in both in-person and online sessions. Reliability assessed via bootstrap split-half correlations was high (mean r = 0.895, 95% CI [.893, .897]). To validate the subjective AoA estimates, we administered vocabulary tests to school students from grades 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10. Two validation procedures were used: grade-level validation and within-grade validation. The former related the grade level at which an item was reliably known with the adult ratings, the latter related adult AoA to students' accuracy. Subjective AoA strongly predicted objective AoA measures (r = 0.805) and showed consistent negative relations with student accuracy across grades. Correlations with existing Russian AoA datasets (r = 0.68-0.91) further supported the reliability of the norms. The new ratings also showed expected correlations with word frequency, length, concreteness, imageability, and familiarity. The resulting norms provide the largest and most comprehensive AoA resource for the Russian language and can support future research in psycholinguistics, lexical processing, and language development. All norms are publicly available on OSF.