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Chapter One Introduction

Over the past three decades，there has been an increasing interest on the age ofacquisition (AOA). It was first proposed by Carroll &White in 1973, which is defined asthe age when people first leam the word either in spoken form or written form (Gilhooly& Logie，1980). For example, the word "apple" is acquired earlier than the word "justice”.AOA effects are that early acquired words are much effective than the late acquired wordsin lexical processing, meanwhile, the former enjoys a shorter processing time than thelatter. For instance, the early acquired words are recognized and produced faster than thelate ones in lexical recognition and production tasks. AOA effect also has been proved ina series of studies such as in visual and auditory lexical decision tasks, semanticcategorization tasks，picture perceptual judge tasks, object picture naming tasks(Gilhoolyl979; Turner, Valentine, & Ellis, 1998; Moore, 2004; Brysbaat et al. 2000;Barry, Morrison，&Ellis，1997). In addition, evidence for AOA effect was not only provedin alphabetic language (such as English, Spanish) but also in ideographic language (suchas Chinese, Japanese) (Bonin，Fayol，&Chalard，2001; Guan, Fang, 2001，2002;Yamazaki et al. 1997). Guan (2002) confirmed that there was an AOA effect in Chinesesingle character words in lexical judge and naming task. Chen (2004) proved this effect inthe process of Chinese double character words recognition.
As for the origin of AOA effects, there are four theoretical hypotheses (phonologicalcompleteness hypothesis, semantic hypothesis, arbitrary mapping hypothesis, cumulativefrequency hypothesis). The four theories elaborate the origin of AOA effect fromdifferent angles. Phonological completeness hypothesis was proposed by Brown &Watson in 1987，which holds the view that the time of naming the late acquired words islonger than that of the early acquired words, because the phonologies of the earlyacquired words are stored in integral forms which makes pronunciation of words easier;however, the late acquired words are in a scattered model which hinders that process.Semantic hypothesis explains the origin of AOA effect from semantic aspect, claimingthat AOA is the most important organizational principle in the formation of the concept, moreover, the meaning of late acquired words is based on the early acquired concept.Arbitrary mapping hypothesis originates from network plasticity hypothesis whichbelieves that the AOA effects reflect the mapping relationship between inputrepresentation (orthography) and output representation (phonology or meaning) in theformation of lexical network. If the mapping between input representation and the outputrepresentation can not be predicted, AOA effects will be large; on tiie contrary if themapping can be predicted, AOA effects will be small. The last theory is cumulativefrequency hypothesis, holding that AOA effect is due to cumulative frequency of thewords which is defined as the frequency of contacting words for people in a period oftime. In this paper we mainly discuss semantic hypothesis and arbitrary mappinghypothesis.
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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Definition of age of acquisition effect and the main theories of the origin of AO Aeffect
The age of acquisition (AOA) is the age when people first lear本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。