Investigating the Word Frequency Effect (WFE) after controlling Age-of-Acquisition (AoA)

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Faculty Sponsor: Barbara J. Juhasz

Meiwen Shao
Meiwen Shao

Meiwen Shao is a rising senior from Shenzhen, China. She attended high school at Tilton School in NH. At Wesleyan, she is double majoring in NS&B and Economics, as well as minoring in Dance. In her spare time, she enjoys figure skating, cooking with friends, and being a language partner for Chinese learners at Wesleyan. She plans on applying to the BA/MA program at Wesleyan post-graduation.

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Abstract: The current study is the first stage of a multi-study project that examines the word frequency effect (WFE) after controlling for Age-of-Acquisition (AoA). WFE and AoA are two well-documented predictors of word recognition latencies. We extracted data from the English Lexical Project (ELP), a database containing behavioral and descriptive data for 40,481 words, to evaluate the size of WFE in lexical decision task and word naming task after controlling AoA and a number of other relevant lexical variables. Although word frequency and AoA are naturally correlated (i.e. words children learn first tend to be higher frequency), this study showed that WFE remain robust in lexical decision and word naming task after controlling AoA.

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