BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Psycholinguistics
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/flang.2025.1605224
Collection of age of acquisition ratings for over 5,000 Japanese words
Provisionally accepted
- 1Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan
- 2Aichi Shukutoku University, Nagakute, Aichi, Japan
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The age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which an individual learns specific items or words. Research on word recognition has shown that items with lower AoA-those acquired earlier-can be processed more quickly and accurately. In the field of Japanese word recognition, a large-scale database that would enable mega-study approaches has not been well-established. In this study, we developed an AoA norm for over 5,000 Japanese words. A total of 1,345 adults rated the AoA of 5,736 words using a 7-point scale. These ratings demonstrated satisfactory reliability. Furthermore, when examining the correlation with lexical decision task performance, words with lower AoA showed shorter response times and higher accuracy than words with higher AoA. These findings indicate that the AoA rating database collected in this study serves as a valuable resource for research using Japanese words.
Keywords: age of acquisition1, Japanese2, lexicon3, word norms4, word recognition5
Received: 03 Apr 2025; Accepted: 14 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mochizuki and Ota. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Masaya Mochizuki, Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan
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