Presentation Modality in Age of Acquisition Rating Reflects Mode of Acquired Knowledge: Evidence from Category-Specific Effects

It has been argued that semantic information is distributed across various types of knowledge domains reflecting the manner in which information was acquired. We analyzed the influence of several common picture naming and word naming predictors across two categories: animals and tools/manipulable objects. However, in the regression analyses we used as additional predictors three different measures of age of acquisition which can be seen as associated with different types of knowledge acquisition (verbal and sensory-motor). The results show that motor information is important for tool and manipulable object processing, and that verbal but not sensory-motor information influences the picture naming of animals. Word naming processing was not influenced by any of the three AoA measures. The results are consistent with the view that the mode of knowledge acquisition is an important part of the semantic representation of an object and its development.