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- Title
Age of acquisition and the completeness of phonological representations.
- Authors
Mobaghan, Josephine; Ellis, Andrew W.
- Abstract
The age of acquisition effect (faster recognition and production of earlier learnt than later learnt words) is a robust finding in both picture naming and written word recognition and naming. One possible explanation of this effect is the Phonological Completeness Hypothesis of Brown and Watson [(1987) Memory & Cognition 15: 208–216], which proposes that early acquired words are recognised and produced faster than late acquired words because they have less fragmented phonological representations. Though often cited, this hypothesis has never been tested experimentally. The present study set out to test this hypothesis using a phonological segmentation task. If early acquired words are stored in a more complete form, then adult participants should be slower to segment early words than late acquired words. In addition, if the AoA effect is a consequence of the quality of an individual's phonological representations then there should be a clear relationship between phonological skill (as measured by the phonological segmentation task) and the magnitude of the AoA effect size. In order to assess the relationships between phonological skill and the AoA effect in adults, participants were also given a word and nonword naming task. The word naming task manipulated AoA and spelling-sound consistency. The results of the segmentation task failed to provide any support for Brown and Watson's (1987) phonological completeness hypothesis. Phonological skill was found to predict the size of the AoA effect in the word naming task, but not the size of the AoA effect in the segmentation task.
- Subjects
INTERPERSONAL relations; VOCABULARY; WORD recognition; COGNITION; READING (Elementary); PHONOLOGY
- Publication
Reading & Writing, 2002, Vol 15, Issue 7/8, p759
- ISSN
0922-4777
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1023/A:1020958722472