The role of age of aquisition in picture and word naming in German.

The relationship between orthography and phonology is central to understanding the role of psycholinguistic variables on lexical tasks. More specifically, the age at which objects and words are learnt has been reported to strongly influence processing speed in a range of lexical tasks and in different orthographies (see Special Issue of Visual Cognition, 2006, 13(7/8) for a review). Several accounts have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, namely the Age of Acquisition (AoA) effect. To substantiate the claims of the arbitrary mapping hypothesis (Ellis & Lambon Ralph, 2000), we explored in two naming experiments whether AoA affects RTs in picture and word naming using the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) picture cohort in German, an orthography with unique print-to-sound mappings. Contrary to the predictions of the arbitrary mapping hypothesis, significant differences were found between early and late acquired items for picture and word naming latencies. Implications are discussed.