Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

There is considerable evidence showing that age ofacquisition (AoA) is an important factor influencing lexicalprocessing. Early-learned words tend to be processed morequickly compared to later-learned words. The effect could bedue to the gradual reduction in plasticity as more words arelearned. Alternatively, it could originate from differenceswithin semantic representations. We implemented the trianglemodel of reading including orthographic, phonological andsemantic processing layers, and trained it according toexperience of a language learner to explore the AoA effects inboth naming and lexical decision. Regression analyses on themodel’s performance showed that AoA was a reliablepredictor of naming and lexical decision performance, and theeffect size was larger for lexical decision than for naming.The modelling results demonstrate that AoA operatesdifferentially on concrete and abstract words, indicating thatboth the mapping and the representation accounts of AoAwere contributing to the model’s performance.