The Effects of Age of Acquisition in Processing Famous Faces and Names: Exploring the Locus and Proposing a Mechanism

Information acquired early in life is processed faster than information acquired late in life. Moore and Valentine (1998) report naming celebrities' faces follows the same pattern of results. This is problematic for the account of age of acquisition (AoA) based on language development because knowledge of celebrities is acquired after early representations are formed in the phonological lexicon. Also, the effects of AoA in lexical decision tasks (LDT) are assumed to be the result of automatic activation of phonology from the printed word. Such an account would predict null effects of AoA on face processing tasks not requiring name production (i.e. names are not automatically accessed, Valentine, Hollis & Moore, 1998). Significant effects of AoA were established in three Experiments: reading aloud printed names, making familiarity decisions to celebrities' names and faces. It is argued that temporal order of acquisition rather than age of acquisition may be the chief determinant of processing speed.