The role of context on age of acquisition effects in visual word recognition: evidence from Turkish.

The influence of Age of Acquisition (AoA) on visual word recognition has been the topic of much recent research with evidence showing how early acquired items, such as words and pictures, are processed faster and more accurately in comparison to late acquired items. Several key questions have been raised with regards to understanding this phenomenon, specifically the locus of the AoA effects and its organisation within the lexical system. In the current study, the locus of AoA effects are further explored from a lexical and semantic level of representation in a series of single-word naming experiments. Participants, adult Turkish speakers who were undergraduate university students, were required to read aloud words manipulated on AoA in a series of single-word naming tasks embedded within differing contexts of filler items that were either manipulated on a) imageability (a semantic variable) or b) frequency (a lexical variable). It was found that AoA effect was modulated according to context and that similar results were reported under both imageability and frequency manipulation indicating that both the lexical and semantic information contribute to AoA. Overall, results suggest that the lexical and semantic context equally impact the size of AoA effect which in turn indicate that semantics and lexical information contribute equally to AoA effect at least in totally transparent orthographies which will be discussed within the current theoretical frameworks. Moreover, the results are explained within a time criterion account in which readers are assumed to utilise effective strategies in reading in response to the context of the reading list