Age of acquisition estimates for 1,208 ambiguous and polysemous words

Abstract

Age of acquisition (AoA) estimates are provided for 3,460 senses of 1,208 words (i. e., words with multiple meanings e. g., duck). The AoA rating estimates appear to be relatively consistent across participants. The Spearman-Brown split-half reliability coefficient is .95, while the correlations between each participant's ratings and the overall mean ratings yielded correlation coefficients between .325 to .794 with a mean of .69 (SD = .10). These estimates will be of use to those interested in: (a) the influence of AoA on word processing, (b) the influence of AoA on meaning access, (c) the structure of semantic memory, and (d) developmental trends in lexical ambiguity resolution. These AoA estimates can be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society's Web archive of norms, stimuli, and data at http://www. psychonomic. org/archive. © 2010 Psychonomic Society, Inc.