Discussing how the "age of acquisition" (AoA), an index of when a word was first learned, effects word and object processing, this issues explores the debate about the operation of AoA and word frequency in word and object processing, and how these effects might be modelled in connectionist architectures.

However, more recent conceptualizations suggest that AoA effects arise out of the order in which items are learned and consequently may operate on many types of recognition task. Recent demonstrations of AoA effects in non-naming tasks may be seen to favour the latter explanation, but the debate is far from over.

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