Age of acquisition of 299 words in seven languages: American English, Czech, Gaelic, Lebanese Arabic, Malay, Persian and Western Armenian

Magdalena Łuniewska; Zofia Wodniecka; Carol A Miller; Filip Smolík; Morna Butcher; Vasiliki Chondrogianni; Edith Kouba Hreich; Camille Messarra; Rogayah A Razak; Jeanine Treffers-Daller; Ngee Thai Yap; Layal Abboud; Ali Talebi; Maribel Gureghian; Laurice Tuller; Ewa Haman

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0220611

Age of acquisition of 299 words in seven languages: American English, Czech, Gaelic, Lebanese Arabic, Malay, Persian and Western Armenian

PLoS One. 2019 Aug 8;14(8):e0220611. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0220611. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Magdalena Łuniewska¹, Zofia Wodniecka^{2

3}, Carol A Miller³, Filip Smolík⁴, Morna Butcher⁵, Vasiliki Chondrogianni⁵, Edith Kouba Hreich⁶, Camille Messarra⁷, Rogayah A Razak⁸, Jeanine Treffers-Daller⁹, Ngee Thai Yap¹⁰, Layal Abboud⁶, Ali Talebi¹¹, Maribel Gureghian⁶, Laurice Tuller¹², Ewa Haman¹

Affiliations

¹ University of Warsaw, Faculty of Psychology, Warsaw, Poland.
² Jagiellonian University, Institute of Psychology, Krakow, Poland.
³ Pennsylvania State University, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America.
⁴ Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Psychology, Prague, Czech Republic.
⁵ University of Edinburgh, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom.
⁶ Saint Joseph University of Beirut, Faculty of Medicine, Beirut, Lebanon.
⁷ Saint Joseph University of Beirut, High Institute of Speech and Language Therapy, Beirut, Lebanon.
⁸ Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Faculty of Health Science, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
⁹ University of Reading, Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics, Reading, United Kingdom.
¹⁰ Universiti Putra Malaysia, Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Serdang, Malaysia.
¹¹ Allameh Tabatabai University, Department of Linguistics and Teaching Persian to Speakers of Other Languages, Teheran, Iran.
¹² University of Tours, UMR 1253, iBrain, Tours, France.

Abstract

We present a new set of subjective Age of Acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in seven languages from various language families and cultural settings: American English, Czech, Scottish Gaelic, Lebanese Arabic, Malaysian Malay, Persian, and Western Armenian. The ratings were collected from a total of 173 participants and were highly reliable in each language. We applied the same method of data collection as used in a previous study on 25 languages which allowed us to create a database of fully comparable AoA ratings of 299 words in 32 languages. We found that in the seven languages not included in the previous study, the words are estimated to be acquired at roughly the same age as in the previously reported languages, i.e. mostly between the ages of 1 and 7 years. We also found that the order of word acquisition is moderately to highly correlated across all 32 languages, which extends our previous conclusion that early words are acquired in similar order across a wide range of languages and cultures.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Age Factors
Child
Child, Preschool
Culture
Humans
Infant
Language*
Learning
Vocabulary*

Grants and funding

This study was designed as a part of a multilingual parallel construction procedure of LITMUS Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (www.psychologia.pl/clts) within the networking program COST Action IS0804 “Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment” (www.bi-sli.org; 2010-2013). The research (website design and maintenance) was supported by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (Grant No. 809/N-COST/2010/0, awarded to the Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, in cooperation with Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University; Principal Investigators: Ewa Haman & Zofia Wodniecka). The research was supported by Visegrad Fund (Standard Grant 21420015: “Bilingual assessment of child lexical knowledge: new method for Polish, Czech, Slovak and Hungarian” awarded to the Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw; PI Ewa Haman), internal grant of Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw (DSM 11710/2017; PI Magdalena Łuniewska), Kościuszko Foundation fellowship awarded to Ewa Haman (2015) and Mobility Plus Fellowship from Ministry of Science and Higher Education awarded to Zofia Wodniecka (2015), CeLM Pump Priming Fund, University of Reading, UK awarded to Jeanine Treffers-Daller (2014): “Developing Crosslinguistic Lexical Tasks for Bilingual Malay Children in Malaysia”, and Bòrd na Gàidhlig grant awarded to Vicky Chondrogianni (2017, award number: 1718/44): “Supporting children with Developmental Language Disorder in Gaelic-medium primary education”.