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Age of acquisition of 299 words in seven languages: American English, Czech, Gaelic, Lebanese Arabic, Malay, Persian and Western Armenian

Łuniewska M 1 , Wodniecka Z 2 , Miller CA 3 , Smolík F 4 , Butcher M 5 , Chondrogianni V 5 Show all authors , Hreich EK 6 , Messarra C 7 , A Razak R 8 , Treffers-Daller J 9 , Yap NT 10 , Abboud L 6 , Talebi A 11 , Gureghian M 6 , Tuller L 12 , Haman E 1

Affiliations 

  • 1 University of Warsaw, Faculty of Psychology, Warsaw, Poland
  • 2 Jagiellonian University, Institute of Psychology, Krakow, Poland
  • 3 Pennsylvania State University, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America
  • 4 Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Psychology, Prague, Czech Republic
  • 5 University of Edinburgh, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
  • 6 Saint Joseph University of Beirut, Faculty of Medicine, Beirut, Lebanon
  • 7 Saint Joseph University of Beirut, High Institute of Speech and Language Therapy, Beirut, Lebanon
  • 8 Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Faculty of Health Science, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 9 University of Reading, Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics, Reading, United Kingdom
  • 10 Universiti Putra Malaysia, Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Serdang, Malaysia
  • 11 Allameh Tabatabai University, Department of Linguistics and Teaching Persian to Speakers of Other Languages, Teheran, Iran
  • 12 University of Tours, UMR 1253, iBrain, Tours, France
PLoS One, 2019;14(8):e0220611.
PMID: 31393919 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0220611

Abstract

We present a new set of subjective Age of Acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in seven languages from various language families and cultural settings: American English, Czech, Scottish Gaelic, Lebanese Arabic, Malaysian Malay, Persian, and Western Armenian. The ratings were collected from a total of 173 participants and were highly reliable in each language. We applied the same method of data collection as used in a previous study on 25 languages which allowed us to create a database of fully comparable AoA ratings of 299 words in 32 languages. We found that in the seven languages not included in the previous study, the words are estimated to be acquired at roughly the same age as in the previously reported languages, i.e. mostly between the ages of 1 and 7 years. We also found that the order of word acquisition is moderately to highly correlated across all 32 languages, which extends our previous conclusion that early words are acquired in similar order across a wide range of languages and cultures.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

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