Age of Acquisition

Age of acquisition, usually abbreviated AOA or AoA, is a psycholinguistic variable referring to the age at which a particular word is typically learned; the word penguin, for example, is typically learned at a younger age than the word albatross. Research in psycholinguistics has found that a word's age of acquisition affects how quickly it is read, with words learned earlier in life processed more quickly than words learned later, and it is a particularly strong predictor of how fast a person can name a picture. Words that are more frequent, shorter, more familiar and refer to concrete concepts tend to be learned earlier than their less frequent, longer, less familiar or more abstract counterparts, whether the words are simple or compound. The effect has been demonstrated across several languages and among bilingual speakers as well.