On the AoA effects and orthographic transparency: evidence from Turkish.

There has been a recent surge of interest in examining the effect of AoA on lexical processing tasks, such as word naming. Evidence from English (e.g. Morrison & Ellis, 1997) suggests that, all other things equal, words acquired earlier tend to be named faster and more accurately than words acquired later on in life. More recently similar findings have emerged from orthographies other than English, namely, Dutch (Brysbaert, Van Wijnendaele, & De Deyne, 2000), Spanish (Weekes, Saenz de Miera & Ioga, 2001) and Italian (Colombo, Brivio & Job, 2001). It is of importance to establish whether AoA could operate as a function of orthographic transparency by examining its effect on word naming in Turkish which has a more transparent orthography than those reported earlier. In a naming task adult skilled Turkish readers were required to name a total of 50 words that were matched on frequency, imageability, letter length, initial phoneme and number of syllables but were varied on AoA. The results indicate an effect for AoA despite the totally consistent, context independent nature of the Turkish writing system. This finding is discussed in view of current models of oral reading.

Symposium Title: Age of Acquisition & Written Language Processing: the Influence of Language and Orthography.