Arnon, I. 1 , McCauley, S. 2 & Christiansen, M. 2
1 Hebrew University
2 Cornell
Words that are acquired earlier show processing advantages in a variety of tasks. These Age-of-Acquisition effects, which are not just frequency effects in disguise, illustrate the way early knowledge influences subsequent learning. Here, we extend these findings to show that multiword phrases also show Age-of-Acquisition effects: adults respond faster and more accurately to early-acquired trigrams (three-word sequences) compared to later-acquired ones. We estimated the AoA of trigrams using a combination of corpus-based measures and subjective rating to create pairs of trigrams that are matched on all adult frequencies (unigram, bigram, and trigram); plausibility; and lexical AoA (e.g., early: a good girl vs. late: a good dad, early-take them off, late-take time off). Using a phrasal-decision task, we show that early-acquired trigrams are responded to faster that later-acquired ones (after controlling for all frequency measures). This is the first study, to our knowledge, to uncover AoA effects for units larger than single words. These findings join the growing evidence that speakers are sensitive to the distributional properties of multiword sequences; suggest that both words and larger units are used in learning; and highlight the effect of early knowledge on learning.