We report the construction of two age-of-acquisition (AoA) norms for 3300+ characters in simplified Chinese, which make up about 99% of the texts used in daily life. We determined a character’s AoA according to the time in which the character is formally learned in two sets of leading textbooks of Chinese in compulsory education, published respectively on the basis of the 2001 and 2011 national curriculum. Apart from having a significantly larger coverage of characters than previous norms, the current norms also outperformed them in explaining accuracy and reaction times in four large-scale databases for character decision, character naming, or character handwriting, even after controlling for the effects of frequency, number of meanings, and number of strokes. The explanatory advantage of the current norms suggests that, compared to earlier norms, the current norms capture more up-to-date character AoAs; these findings also highlight the diachronic nature of some lexical variables such as AoA and frequency. The developed objective AoA norms can be used for subsequent research on Chinese character recognition or production.

我们报告了为 3300 多个简体中文字符构建了两个获取年龄 (AoA) 规范，这些字符约占日常生活中使用的文本的 99%。我们根据2001年和2011年国家课程分别出版的两套义务教育汉语领先教材中正式学习汉字的时间来确定汉字的AoA。除了比以前的规范具有明显更大的字符覆盖范围之外，即使在控制了频率的影响之后，当前规范在字符决策、字符命名或字符手写的四个大型数据库中的解释准确性和反应时间方面也优于它们，含义数和笔画数。当前规范的解释性优势表明，与早期规范相比，当前的规范捕获了更多最新的角色 AoA；这些发现还强调了一些词汇变量的历时性，例如 AoA 和频率。制定的客观AoA规范可用于后续汉字识别或汉字制作的研究。