ABSTRACT
The well established effect of word frequency on adult's picture naming performance is now called into question. This is particularly true for variables which are correlated with frequency, as is the case of age of word acquisition. Since the work of [Carrol and White, 1973] there is growing agreement among researchers to confer an important role in lexical access to this variable. Indeed, it has been shown ( [Hodgson and Ellis, 1998]) that for normal English-speaking adults only the variables 'age-of-acquisition' and 'name agreement' are independent predictors of naming success among the various variables considered. However, when brain-damaged subjects with and without degenerative pathologies are studied, word frequency and word length as well as concept familiarity all give significant effects ( [Hirsh and Funnell, 1995]; [Lambon Ralph et al., 1998]; [Nickels and Howard, 1995]). Finally, it has been suggested that the production of specific error types may be related to such variables. According to [Nickels and Howard, 1994] the production of semantic errors is specifically affected by 'imageability' and in the recent study by [Kremin et al., 2001] 'age of acquisition' predicts (frank) word finding difficulties.
