Familiarity and Age of Acquisition Ratings for English Words by Taiwanese College Students Author:Ting-Ting Chang, Jun Ren Lee
Research Article
Frequency, familiarity, and age of acquisition are important factors of word recognition that must be considered by researchers of language acquisition. Current psycholinguistic databases, based on studies of native English speakers, include objective frequency count, subjective rating of familiarity, and age of acquisition. One can easily employ those databases to obtain a stimulus list for one’s studies. For word recognition researcher interested in non-native English speakers of Taiwan, however, there is currently no existing database. In this study, we created a psycholinguistic database which includes subjective familiarity rating and age of acquisition for 3,080 English words. Participants (120 college students) were asked to make judgments about 4,000 stimulus words. For recognized stimulus words, participants gave a rating of familiarity and self-report of age of acquisition; for non-recognized words, participants were asked to move on to the next stimulus word. Further analysis of the database showed that familiarity index, age of acquisition, and number of syllables are important factors for the recognition of a word. Variance in word recognition rate for each factor is explained and implications are discussed.