Date of Award

5-1-2023

Language

English

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

College/School/Department

Department of Psychology

Content Description

1 online resource (ii, 32 pages) : illustrations.

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Heather Sheridan

Committee Members

Gregory Cox

Keywords

age-of-acquisition, AoA, AoA effects, proofreading, task demands, task effects, Proofreading, Spelling errors, Language acquisition, Psycholinguistics

Subject Categories

Cognitive Psychology

Abstract

During reading, words are processed faster if they are rated as being acquired early in life compared to later in life (i.e., age of acquisition effects; AoA). Given that the task demands for proofreading differ from reading, we investigated if AoA effects extend to an online proofreading task. Specifically, early- and late-acquired target words were embedded in sentence frames after being matched for a variety of potentially confounding variables, including word frequency, length, imageability, OLD-20, and familiarity (using the stimulus set from Juhasz & Sheridan, 2020). The participants rapidly proofread these sentences for spelling errors, and our results showed that they detected spelling errors in early-acquired words more frequently than in late-acquired words. This advantage in proofreading performance for early-acquired words demonstrates that AoA effects, which have been extensively documented in reading tasks, can also extend to proofreading. We discuss the implications of our results for theories of AoA effects.

Download

Share

COinS