Differential effects of age of acquisition and frequency on memory: evidence from free recall of pictures and words in Turkish

The advantage of processing early acquired items over late acquired items in lexical and semantic tasks across a number of languages is well documented. Interestingly contradictory evidence has been reported in recall tasks where participants perform better overall on late acquired items compared to early acquired items in English (Dewhurst, Hitch & Barry, 1998). Moreover, free recall has also been reported to be modulated by frequency as well as list type in that studying pure lists of high frequency words or low frequency words typically leads to a recall advantage for high frequency words (Dewhurst, Brandt & Sharp, 2004). This recall advantage either disappears or is reversed when the same items are presented in mixed lists containing both high and low frequency items (Dewhurst et al, 2004). The current experiment aims to shed further light on this discrepancy by exploring the influence of AoA and frequency on free recall on standardised pictures and their names (words) in Turkish in mixed and pure lists (Raman, Raman & Mertan, 2014). Eighty participants were recruited from Yeditepe University and were assigned to either a picture (N=40) or a word condition (N=40) in which stimuli were presented in either a mixed or a pure list. Following a distracter task, participants were asked to recall as many pictures or words as they could remember from the list they viewed. The findings lend partial support to the previous findings in English and the implications are discussed within the context of current cognitive frameworks.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Writing Systems Research on 01/02/2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17586801.2017.1420727