Montefinese Maria, Vinson David, Vigliocco Gabriella, Ambrosini Ettore
Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2019 Feb 13;10:278. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00278. eCollection 2019.
Age of acquisition (AoA) is an important psycholinguistic variable that affects the performance of healthy individuals and patients in a large variety of cognitive tasks. For this reason, it becomes more and more compelling to collect new AoA norms for a large set of stimuli in order to allow better control and manipulation of AoA in future research. An important motivation of the present study is to extend previous Italian norms by collecting AoA ratings for a much larger range of Italian words for which concreteness and semantic-affective norms are now available thus ensuring greater coverage of words varying along these dimensions. In the present study, we collected AoA ratings for 1,957 Italian content words (adjectives, nouns, and verbs), by asking healthy adult participants to estimate the age at which they thought they had learned the word in a Web survey procedure. First, we found high split-half correlation within our sample, suggesting strong internal reliability. Second, our data indicate that the ratings collected in this study are as valid and reliable as those collected in previous studies for Italian across different age populations (adult and children) and other languages. Finally, we analyzed the relation between AoA ratings and other lexical-semantic variables (e.g., word frequency, imageability, valence, arousal) and showed that these correlations were generally consistent with the correlations reported in other normative studies for Italian and other languages. Therefore, our new AoA norms are a valuable source of information for future research in the Italian language. The full database is available at the Open Science Framework (osf.io/3trg2).
习得年龄（AoA）是一个重要的心理语言学变量，它会影响健康个体和患者在各类认知任务中的表现。因此，为大量刺激收集新的AoA常模变得越来越迫切，以便在未来研究中更好地控制和操纵AoA。本研究的一个重要动机是扩展先前的意大利语常模，通过收集更多意大利语单词的AoA评级，目前这些单词的具体性和语义情感常模已可用，从而确保在这些维度上变化的单词有更大的覆盖范围。在本研究中，我们通过要求健康的成年参与者在网络调查程序中估计他们认为自己学会该单词的年龄，收集了1957个意大利语实词（形容词、名词和动词）的AoA评级。首先，我们在样本中发现了较高的分半相关性，表明内部可靠性很强。其次，我们的数据表明，本研究收集的评级与先前针对不同年龄人群（成人和儿童）的意大利语及其他语言研究中收集的评级一样有效和可靠。最后，我们分析了AoA评级与其他词汇语义变量（如词频、可想象性、效价、唤醒度）之间的关系，结果表明这些相关性通常与意大利语和其他语言的其他规范性研究报告的相关性一致。因此，我们新的AoA常模是意大利语未来研究的宝贵信息来源。完整数据库可在开放科学框架（osf.io/3trg2）获取。
