The Effects of Age of Acquisition and Semantic Congruency on Famous Person Category Verification

The age of acquisition (AoA) effect, a processing advantage for items learnt earlier in life, affects naming and making familiarity decisions about famous people. However, its influence on semantic processing tasks involving celebrity stimuli is equivocal. In a category verification task designed to explore this issue further, mature adults were shown an area of fame, followed by a famous person’s name. They were asked to indicate whether the area of fame and the celebrity matched. Stimulus congruency and AoA were manipulated orthogonally, with familiarity and facial distinctiveness being controlled. Faster and more accurate responses were produced when the area of fame and the celebrity matched. Faster and more accurate responses were made to early-acquired celebrities but the interaction fell short of significance but is consistent with that reported for lexical processing. With adequate control of extraneous variables and an extended distance between stimulus groups, AoA would seem to have an influence on the semantic processing of famous people and interacts near significance with congruency. The results are considered in the light of multiple loci theories of AoA.