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Age of acquisition (AoA) is a measure of word complexity which refers to the age at which a word is typically learned. AoA measures have shown strong correlations with reading comprehension, lexical decision times, and writing quality. AoA scores based on both adult and child data have limitations that allow for error in measurement, and increase the cost and effort to produce. In this paper, we introduce Age of Exposure (AoE) version 2, a proxy for human exposure to new vocabulary terms that expands AoA word lists through training regressors to predict AoA scores. Word2vec word embeddings are trained on cumulatively increasing corpora of texts, word exposure trajectories are generated by aligning the word2vec vector spaces, and features of words are derived for modeling AoA scores. Our prediction models achieve low errors (from 13% with a corresponding R

Computer-based learning environments (CBLEs) provide unprecedented opportunities for personalized learning at scale. One such system, iSTART (Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Th...

The ability to objectively quantify the complexity of a text can be a useful indicator of how likely learners of a given level will comprehend it. Before creating more complex models of assessing text difficulty, the basic building block of a text consists of words and, inherently, its overall difficulty is greatly influenced by the complexity of underlying words. One approach is to measure a word’s Age of Acquisition (AoA), an estimate of the average age at which a speaker of a language understands the semantics of a specific word. Age of Exposure (AoE) statistically models the process of word learning, and in turn an estimate of a given word’s AoA. In this paper, we expand on the model proposed by AoE by training regression models that learn and generalize AoA word lists across multiple languages including English, German, French, and Spanish. Our approach allows for the estimation of AoA scores for words that are not found in the original lists, up to the majority of the target language’s vocabulary. Our method can be uniformly applied across multiple languages though the usage of parallel corpora and helps bridge the gap in the size of AoA word lists available for non-English languages. This effort is particularly important for efforts toward extending AI to languages with fewer resources and benchmarked corpora.