Confidence in age-of-acquisition estimates and its relationship to children’s labeling performance

Abstract

College students estimated the age-of-acquisition (AA) of the names of 456 colored picturable objects and gave their confidence in those estimates. From these stimuli, 414 with U values ⩽ 1.0 were selected for analyses. When compared with males, females estimated that the picture names had been acquired at an earlier age, and they were more confident in their AA estimates. The earlier the estimated AA, the more confident both groups were in their estimations. Labeling performance of the same stimuli by 5-year olds (Winters & Brzoska, 1975) was related to adults’ estimated AA. Words that were labeled most efficiently by children were estimated to have been acquired earlier by adults. Sex differences were interpreted in terms of different strategies of estimating AA. © 1978, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.