Age of acquisition/exposure

Definition

Age of acquisition (AoA) and/or age of exposure (AoE) indicate the average age a native speaker learns or first encounters a word.

Corpus used

  • AoA: N/A
  • AoE: TASA (Touchstone Applied Sciences Associates)

Register

  • AoA: Written surveys
  • AoE: Educational texts

Calculated indices

Age of acquisition (AoA)

  • Definition: Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which a person is first expected to learn a particular word. This measure is based on AoA norms that were collected for 30,121 lemmas (Kuperman et al., 2012).
  • Description: Average age of acquisition score
  • Methodology: Mean; sum of AoA scores divided by the number of words in the text with AoA scores
  • Indices:
    • Kuperman_AoA
    • Kuperman_AoA_TP
    • Kuperman_AoA_CW
    • Kuperman_AoA_CW_TP
    • Kuperman_AoA_FW
    • Kuperman_AoA_FW_TP

Age of exposure (AoE)

  • Definition: Age of exposure (AoE) refers to the age at which a person is first expected to encounter a particular word in an educational context. All AoE indices provide a measure of similarity based on words co-occurring in similar contexts.
  • Description: Incremental score for words across 13 grade levels using LDA modeling
  • Methodology: LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) modeling
  • Indices:
    • aoe_inverse_average
    • aoe_inverse_average_TP
    • aoe_inverse_linear_regression_slope
    • aoe_inverse_linear_regression_slope_TP
    • aoe_index_above_threshold_40
    • aoe_index_above_threshold_40_TP
    • aoe_inflection_point_polynomial
    • aoe_inflection_point_polynomial_TP

Notes

  • TP means type-based calculations, while all other indices are token-based.
  • The Kuperman indices are calculated based on raw word tokens.

References

  • Kuperman, V., Stadthagen-Gonzalez, H., & Brysbaert, M. (2012). Age-of-acquisition ratings for 30,000 English words. Behavior research methods, 44, 978-990. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-012-0210-4