Young childrens age of acquisition estimates for spoken words

This study was concerned with the impact of stimulus familiarity on young children's ability to recognize spoken words and make explicit judgments about them. In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds made age-of-acquisition (AOA) estimates for a set of words that were very similar to estimates made by older children and adults. In Experiment 2, young children's picture recognition, mispronunciation detection, and vocabulary monitoring performance all varied systematically with these AOA estimates and with a stimulus-type (intact-mispronounced) manipulation. Subjective AOA estimates (whether from children or from adults) proved to be a better predictor of performance than did two objective familiarity measures and subjective imageability. These results point to considerable metalexical knowledge on the part of young children or explicit sensitivity regarding their own vocabulary knowledge. In addition, the results lend some support to the notion that actual AOA contributes to subjective AOA estimates.