Subjective age of acquisition norms for 1604 English words by Spanish L2 speakers of English and their relationship with lexico-semantic, affective, sociolinguistic and proficiency variables

Abstract

Psycholinguistic studies have shown that there are many variables implicated in language comprehension and production. At the lexical level, subjective age of acquisition (AoA), the estimate of the age at which a word is acquired, is key for stimuli selection in psycholinguistic studies. AoA databases in English are often used when testing a variety of phenomena in second language (L2) speakers of English. However, these have limitations, as the norms are not provided by the target population (L2 speakers of English) but by native English speakers. In this study, we asked native Spanish L2 speakers of English to provide subjective AoA ratings for 1604 English words, and investigated whether factors related to 14 lexico-semantic and affective variables, both in Spanish and English, and to the speakers' profile (i.e., sociolinguistic variables and L2 proficiency), were related to the L2 AoA ratings. We used boosted regression trees, an advanced form of regression analysis based on machine learning and boosting algorithms, to analyse the data. Our results showed that the model accounted for a relevant proportion of deviance (58.56%), with the English AoA provided by native English speakers being the strongest predictor for L2 AoA. Additionally, L2 AoA correlated with L2 reaction times. Our database is a useful tool for the research community running psycholinguistic studies in L2 speakers of English. It adds knowledge about which factors-linked to the characteristics of both the linguistic stimuli and the speakers-affect L2 subjective AoA. The database and the data can be downloaded from: https://osf.io/gr8xd/?view_only=73b01dccbedb4d7897c8d104d3d68c46 .

Keywords: Age of acquisition; Boosted regression trees; Second language speakers.

Fig. 1

Layout of a word and the rating scale in the age of acquisition rating task

Fig. 2

Frequency distribution of L2 AoA ratings

Fig. 3

Left: boxplot displaying L2 AoA values in our database and Dirix and Duyck (2017), including the 549 words available in both databases. Right: boxplot displaying L2 AoA values in our database and Wang and Chen (2020), including the 731 words available in both databases

Fig. 4

Partial dependence plots for the variables included in the simplified BRTs model predicting responses to the L2 AoA ratings, ordered by decreasing RC

Fig. 4

Partial dependence plots for the variables included in the simplified BRTs model predicting responses to the L2 AoA ratings, ordered by decreasing RC