Subjective ratings of age-of-acquisition: Exploring issues of validity and rater reliability

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Abstract

This study aimed to investigate concerns of validity and reliability in subjective ratings of age-of-acquisition (AoA), through exploring characteristics of the individual rater. An additional aim was to validate the obtained AoA ratings against two corpora - one of child speech and one of adult speech - specifically exploring whether words over-represented in the child-speech corpus are rated with lower AoA than words characteristic of the adult-speech corpus. The results show that less than one-third of participating informants' ratings are valid and reliable. However, individuals with high familiarity with preschool-aged children provide more valid and reliable ratings, compared to individuals who do not work with or have children of their own. The results further show a significant, age-adjacent difference in rated AoA for words from the two different corpora, thus strengthening their validity. The study provides AoA data, of high specificity, for 100 child-specific and 100 adult-specific Swedish words.

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APA

Wikse Barrow, C., Nilsson Björkenstam, K., & Strömbergsson, S. (2019). Subjective ratings of age-of-acquisition: Exploring issues of validity and rater reliability. Journal of Child Language, 46(2), 199–213. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000918000363

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