Harmonizing in Tune: Age of Acquisition in Melodic Recognition

Across cultures and languages, early-learned words are processed more quickly than late-learned words, an effect known as the Age of Acquisition (AoA) effect. This advantage is argued to arise from the early development of semantic representations and the nature of the links between them. Specifically, the AoA effect is most pronounced in tasks requiring deep semantic processing or when the mapping between representations is arbitrary. However, the role of the AoA in music, where lexical-semantic processing may be less prominent, remains unclear. To investigate this, we used melody-melody, melody-title, and title-melody verification tasks. We found that the AoA were limited across most tasks. While melody-melody verification showed no AoA effect, a significant reverse AoA effect emerged in the melody-title and title-melody verification task. Late-acquired melodies were recognized more quickly and more accurately than early-acquired ones. This effect only occurred when imageability and naming was included in the model, suggesting that imageability and naming acts as a suppressor variable in the relationship between AoA and melody recognition. Our findings support the Representation Account of AoA, indicating that the musical lexicon is organized by the semantic distinctiveness of representations as opposed to the mapping between representations.