ERIC Number: EJ1205640
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2019-Mar
Pages: 15
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
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Available Date: N/A
Subjective Ratings of Age-of-Acquisition: Exploring Issues of Validity and Rater Reliability
Wikse Barrow, Carla; Nilsson Bjorkenstam, Kristina; Strombergsson, Sofia
Journal of Child Language, v46 n2 p199-213 Mar 2019
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.
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Evaluators, Validity, Reliability, Age Differences, Child Language, Computational Linguistics, Speech Communication, Familiarity, Preschool Children, Vocabulary Development, Swedish
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
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Language: English
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