Age-of-acquisition norms for a set of 1,749 Portuguese words

Age of acquisition (AoA) is an important psycholinguistic variable that affects the speed and accuracy of lexical processing in tasks such as word naming, picture naming, and lexical decision. In the present work, we collected AoA ratings for 1,749 Portuguese words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs), using a 9-point scale that was first proposed by Carroll and White (1973). We analyzed the relation between AoA ratings and other psycholinguistic variables (length measures, neighborhood density, written-word frequency, familiarity, imageability, and concreteness), and we assessed reliability by correlating our ratings with those from other databases presented for Portuguese, English, Spanish, and Italian. The full database can be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Age-of-acquisition,imagery, familiarity and meaningfulness norms for 543 words

The age at which words are first learned appears to be more influential in determining the ease of retrieving words from semantic memory than objective frequency, familiarity, imagery, and meaningfulness. To facilitate research on a wider variety of tasks, we present norms for 543 words for age-of-acquisition, imagery, familiarity, and meaningfulness. Most of the words form single-solution anagrams. There are 471 six-letter nouns and 72 five-letter words. Also reported are the means, SDs, and ranges for each dimension and the intercorrelations between dimensions. Intergroup reliabilities ranged from .847 to .982.     

Imageability ratings for 3,000 monosyllabic words

Imageability ratings made on a 1–7 scale and reaction times for 3,000 monosyllabic words were obtained from 31 participants. Analyses comparing these ratings to 1,153 common words from Toglia and Battig (1978) indicate that these ratings are valid. Reliability was assessed (α = .95). The information obtained in this study adds to that of other normative studies and is useful to researchers interested in manipulating or controlling imageability in word recognition and memory studies. These norms can be downloaded fromwww.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

Imageability ratings for 3,000 monosyllabic words.

Imageability ratings made on a 1-7 scale and reaction times for 3,000 monosyllabic words were obtained from 31 participants. Analyses comparing these ratings to 1,153 common words from Toglia and Battig (1978) indicate that these ratings are valid. Reliability was assessed (alpha = .95). The information obtained in this study adds to that of other normative studies and is useful to researchers interested in manipulating or controlling imageability in word recognition and memory studies. These norms can be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

Norms of age of acquisition and concreteness for 30,000 Dutch words

Word processing studies increasingly make use of regression analyses based on large numbers of stimuli (the so-called megastudy approach) rather than experimental designs based on small factorial designs. This requires the availability of word features for many words. Following similar studies in English, we present and validate ratings of age of acquisition and concreteness for 30,000 Dutch words. These include nearly all lemmas language researchers are likely to be interested in. The ratings are freely available for research purposes.     

Age-of-acquisition,imagery, concreteness,familiarity, and ambiguity measures for 1,944 words

Age-of-acquisition, imagery, concreteness, familiarity, and ambiguity measures for 1,944 words of varying length and frequency of occurrence are presented. The words can all be used as nouns. Intergroup reliabilities are satisfactory on all attributes. Correlations with previous word lists are significant, and the intercorrelations between measures match previous findings.     

Age of acquisition ratings for 3,000 monosyllabic words

Age of acquisition (AoA) ratings made on a 1-7 scale for 3,000 monosyllabic words were obtained from 32 participants across four blocks of 750 trials (two blocks of 750 trials were completed in each of 2 days). These results, as well as those of the regression analyses and reliability and validity measures that were originally reported in Cortese and Khanna (2007), are summarized here. Here, we also report high interblock correlations across items, indicating that participants were consistent in their ratings across blocks. The norms for the 3,000 words are important for researchers interested in word processing and may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society's Norms, Stimuli, and Data archive at www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Sensory experience ratings for over 5,000 mono- and disyllabic words

Sensory experience ratings (SERs) reflect the extent to which a word evokes a sensory and/or perceptual experience in the mind of the reader. Juhasz, Yap, Dicke, Taylor, and Gullick (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 64:1683–1691, 2011) demonstrated that SERs predict a significant amount of variance in lexical-decision response times in two megastudies of lexical processing when a large number of established psycholinguistic variables are controlled for. Here we provide the SERs for the 2,857 monosyllabic words used in the Juhasz et al. study, as well as newly collected ratings on 3,000 disyllabic words. New analyses with the combined set of words confirmed that SERs predict a reliable amount of variance in the lexical-decision response times and naming times from the English Lexicon Project (Balota, Yap, Cortese, Hutchison, Kessler, Loftus, & Treiman, Behavior Research Methods 39:445–459, 2007) when a large number of surface, lexical, and semantic variables are statistically controlled for. The results suggest that the relative availability of sensory/perceptual information associated with a word contributes to lexical–semantic processing.     

Modality dependency of familiarity ratings of Japanese words

Familiarity ratings for a large number of aurally and visually presented Japanese words were measured for 11 subjects, in order to investigate the modality dependency of familiarity. The correlation coefficient between auditory and visual ratings was .808, which is lower than that observed for English words, suggesting that a substantial portion of the mental lexicon is modality dependent. It was shown that the modality dependency is greater for low-familiarity words than it is for medium- or high-familiarity words. This difference between the low- and the medium- or high-familiarity words has a relationship to orthography. That is, the dependency is larger in words consisting only ofkanji, which may have multiple pronunciations and usually represent meaning, than it is in words consisting only ofhiragana or katakana, which have a single pronunciation and usually do not represent meaning. These results indicate that the idiosyncratic characteristics of Japanese orthography contribute to the modality dependency.     

Humor norms for 4,997 English words

Humor ratings are provided for 4,997 English words collected from 821 participants using an online crowd-sourcing platform. Each participant rated 211 words on a scale from 1 (humorless) to 5 (humorous). To provide for comparisons across norms, words were chosen from a set common to a number of previously collected norms (e.g., arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, age of acquisition, and reaction time). The complete dataset provides researchers with a list of humor ratings and includes information on gender, age, and educational differences. Results of analyses show that the ratings have reliability on a par with previous ratings and are not well predicted by existing norms.     

Age-of-acquisition and subjective frequency estimates for all generally known monosyllabic French words and their relation with other psycholinguistic variables

Ratings for age of acquisition (AoA) and subjective frequency were collected for the 1,493 monosyllabic French words that were most known to French students. AoA ratings were collected by asking participants to estimate in years the age at which they learned each word. Subjective frequency ratings were collected on a 7-point scale, ranging from never encountered to encountered several times daily. The results were analyzed to address the relationship between AoA and subjective frequency ratings with other psycholinguistic variables (objective frequency, imageability, number of letters, and number of orthographic neighbors). The results showed high reliability ratings with other databases. Supplementary materials for this study may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society’s Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Moved by words: Affective ratings for a set of 2,266 Spanish words in five discrete emotion categories

The two main theoretical accounts of the human affective space are the dimensional perspective and the discrete-emotion approach. In recent years, several affective norms have been developed from a dimensional perspective, including ratings for valence and arousal. In contrast, the number of published datasets relying on the discrete-emotion approach is much lower. There is a need to fill this gap, considering that discrete emotions have an effect on word processing above and beyond those of valence and arousal. In the present study, we present ratings from 1,380 participants for a set of 2,266 Spanish words in five discrete emotion categories: happiness, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness. This will be the largest dataset published to date containing ratings for discrete emotions. We also present, for the first time, a fine-grained analysis of the distribution of words into the five emotion categories. This analysis reveals that happiness words are the most consistently related to a single, discrete emotion category. In contrast, there is a tendency for many negative words to belong to more than one discrete emotion. The only exception is disgust words, which overlap least with the other negative emotions. Normative valence and arousal data already exist for all of the words included in this corpus. Thus, the present database will allow researchers to design studies to contrast the predictions of the two most influential theoretical perspectives in this field. These studies will undoubtedly contribute to a deeper understanding of the effects of emotion on word processing.     

Age of acquisition and imageability ratings for a large set of words, including verbs and function words

Age of acquisition and imageability ratings were collected for 2,645 words, including 892 verbs and 213 function words. Words that were ambiguous as to grammatical category were disambiguated: Verbs were shown in their infinitival form, and nouns (where appropriate) were preceded by the indefinite article (such asto crack anda crack). Subjects were speakers of British English selected from a wide age range, so that differences in the responses across age groups could be compared. Within the subset of early acquired noun/verb homonyms, the verb forms were rated as later acquired than the nouns, and the verb homonyms of high-image ability nouns were rated as significantly less imageable than their noun counterparts. A small number of words received significantly earlier or later age of acquisition ratings when the 20–40 years and 50–80 years age groups were compared. These tend to comprise words that have come to be used more frequently in recent years (either through technological advances or social change), or those that have fallen out of common usage. Regression analyses showed that although word length, familiarity, and concreteness make independent contributions to the age of acquisition measure, frequency and imageability are the most important predictors of rated age of acquisition.     

Individual differences in ratings of words combined in sentences

To examine the efficiency of regression-compounded group means as predictors of individual ratings of words combined in sentences, a study by Heise (1969) was replicated and extended to obtain pre- and postcombination ratings from the same subjects. Heise's model efficiently predicted group ratings for words combined in sentences (R²=0.86), but neither group-weighted (R²=0.19) nor individually weighted (R²=0.28) regression equations efficiently predicted the rating of individual subjects. The findings are consistent with several findings that question the applicability of widely studied models of attitude change to individual differences and alternative approaches to this problem are discussed.     

Chinese translation norms for 1,429 English words

We present Chinese translation norms for 1,429 English words. Chinese-English bilinguals (N = 28) were asked to provide the first Chinese translation that came to mind for 1,429 English words. The results revealed that 71 % of the English words received more than one correct translation indicating the large amount of translation ambiguity when translating from English to Chinese. The relationship between translation ambiguity and word frequency, concreteness and language proficiency was investigated. Although the significant correlations were not strong, results revealed that English word frequency was positively correlated with the number of alternative translations, whereas English word concreteness was negatively correlated with the number of translations. Importantly, regression analyses showed that the number of Chinese translations was predicted by word frequency and concreteness. Furthermore, an interaction between these predictors revealed that the number of translations was more affected by word frequency for more concrete words than for less concrete words. In addition, mixed-effects modelling showed that word frequency, concreteness and English language proficiency were all significant predictors of whether or not a dominant translation was provided. Finally, correlations between the word frequencies of English words and their Chinese dominant translations were higher for translation-unambiguous pairs than for translation-ambiguous pairs. The translation norms are made available in a database together with lexical information about the words, which will be a useful resource for researchers investigating Chinese-English bilingual language processing.     

Ratings for Welsh words and their English equivalents

The rating of English words and their Welsh equivalents provided the opportunity to compare subjective ratings in two languages as well as the opportunity to compare ratings in a deep and a shallow orthography (English and Welsh, respectively). Four variables—age of acquisition (AOA), familiarity, concreteness, and imageability—were rated. AOA and imageability emerged as the two most important extralingual variables (r=.8 and .73, respectively). Although the patterns of ratings were generally consistent within and between languages, some differences did emerge when these patterns were compared with those from other studies. Using similar instructions to rate familiarity and AOA resulted in a low correlation in English (r=2.5) and a high correlation in Welsh (r=2.84). The mean ratings for familiarity, concreteness, and imageability were higher in Welsh than in English (5.23 vs. 3.35, 5.46 vs. 4.41, and 5.29 vs. 4.38, respectively). Both of these findings are explained in terms of differences in orthographic depth, and it is suggested that Welsh may be a more imageable language than English.