Age-of-acquisition effects in picture naming in Turkish using Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures.

The arbitrary mapping hypothesis (Ellis & Lambon-Ralph, 2000) predicts that AoA effects should be stronger for tasks that involve arbitrary mappings between representations than for tasks that involve consistent mappings. The role of AoA was explored in transparent Turkish orthography in a picture and a word naming task in order to test these claims. Independent ratings were obtained for Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) line drawings and presented for naming. Evidence from Turkish and other orthographies with a varying degree of transparency between print and sound suggest that AoA effects are perhaps universal irrespective of orthographic transparency. Implications are discussed