Guessing the Age of Acquisition of Italian Lemmas through Linear Regression

Abstract

The age of acquisition of a word is a psycholinguistic variable concerning the age at which a word is typically learned. It correlates with other psycholinguistic variables such as familiarity, concreteness, and imageability. Existing datasets for multiple languages also include linguistic variables such as the length and the frequency of lemmas in different corpora. There are substantial sets of normative values for English, but for other languages, such as Italian, the coverage is scarce. In this paper,a set of regression experiments investigates whether it is possible to guess the age of acquisition of Italian lemmas that have not been previously rated by humans. An intrinsic evaluation is proposed, correlating estimated Italian lemmas’ AoA with English lemmas’ AoA. An extrinsic evaluation - using AoA values as features for the classification of literary excerpts labeled by age appropriateness - shows how es-sential is lexical coverage for this task.