Imagery,concreteness, age-of-acquisition,familiarity, and meaningfulness values for 205 five-letter words having single-solution anagrams

Solution-word imagery appears to affect difficulty of anagram solving. To assist research in this area, we present imagery, concreteness, age-of-acquisition, familiarity, and meaningfulness values for 205 five-letter words known to form single-solution anagrams. None of the words have repeated letters. Intergroup reliabilities were satisfactory on all attributes. Significant correlations were found with previous word lists and the intercorrelations between dimensions matched previous findings.     

Word norms for blind and sighted subjects: Familiarity,concreteness, meaningfulness,imageability, imagery modality,and word associations

Normative values for word characteristics were obtained from a sample of 12 college-educated, totally congenitally blind subjects on the basis of their ratings of 161 nouns on scales of familiarity, concreteness, meaningfulness, and imageability. The dominant modality of imagery for each image-evoking word and the strongest word associate for each item also were recorded. The same data were collected for a group of sighted subjects, both to provide a comparison group for the blind subjects and to test the comparability of sighted subjects’ ratings with existing norms. Ratings for sighted subjects correlated strongly with those norms, although the coefficients were slightly higher for ratings of concreteness and imageability than for ratings of familiarity and meaningfulness. Ratings of blind subjects correlated only slightly lower with existing norms for imagery and concreteness, but considerably lower for familiarity and meaningfulness.     

Effects of different kinds of semantic processing on memory for words

In an incidental learning paradigm, recall and recognition memory were shown to be significantly better for words rated on pleasantness than on any of the other six semantic dimensions (concreteness, imagery, categorizability, meaningfulness, familiarity, and number of attributes) recently used for scaling of 2,854 words by Toglia and Battig (1978). Pleasantness ratings are also relatively uncorrelated with ratings on these other six dimensions, and the pattern of memory differences between these seven dimensions corresponds closely to differences in dimensional distinctiveness, as indexed by the average correlation of each dimension with the other six dimensions as reported by Toglia and Battig (1978). Word subsets with high and low mean ratings on all seven dimensions showed comparable dimensional differences in memory, but high words were both recalled and recognized better than were low words.     

Meaningfulness values of words: relation to concreteness, imagery, emotionality, and interest.

We estimated that, contrary to previous studies, there was a positive correlation between ratings of meaningfulness and of emotionality of words. The correlation was .36 between ratings of meaningfulness and emotionality obtained by Campos and González but .03 with ratings obtained in 1990 by Campos. Hypothesized positive correlations for ratings of meaningfulness with ratings of concreteness, imagery, and interest were significant.     

Associative asymmetry,availability, and retrieval

Associative frequency, the ease with which a word comes to mind in free association, is taken as a measure of general response availability. As expected from this view, in both controlled experiments and in reanalyses of previously published correlational data, high associative frequency words were judged to be more familiar and were easier to recall but harder to recognize than low associative frequency words, even with meaningfulness, imagery, length in letters, and frequency excluded as factors. When used as foils in a recognition experiment, high associative frequency words attracted more responses than low associative frequency words. In addition, associative frequency and meaningfulness correlated only moderately and had different patterns of correlations with other variables, suggesting that the number of associations leading to and from a word differ.     

Imagery, concreteness, and meaningfulness as determiners of the emotionality of words when meaning is controlled.

We studied variables that influenced rated emotionality value of words and the contribution of each one. 218 subjects rated each word in a list of 98 pairs of words (196 words), one concrete word and one abstract word in each pair, on imagery, concreteness, meaningfulness, and emotionality. Date of entry of each word into Spanish and word length were also examined. Stepwise multiple regression procedures were performed to evaluate the contribution made by each variable to over-all emotionality values. 39.06% of the emotionality variance was explained by imagery. Concreteness and meaningfulness values contributed 3.62% and 2.82%, respectively. Word length and date of entry were rejected in the final equation, as their contributions were minimal.     

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.     

Predicting which words get recalled: Measures of free recall,availability, goodness,emotionality, and pronunciability for 925 nouns

To investigate the properties that make a word easy to recall, we added to existing norms for 925 nouns measures of availability, goodness, emotionality, pronunciability, and probability of recall in multiple-trial free recall. Availability, imagery, and emotionality were found to be the best predictors of which words were recalled. This result, which is stable across recall data collected in three separate laboratories, argues for the importance of availability as a predictor of recall and questions the role of the correlated variables of word frequency and meaningfulness. Consistent with earlier work on a smaller sample of words, six factors describe the numerous properties of words studied by psychologists. The six factors are composed of variables based on orthography, imagery and meaning, word frequency, recall, emotionality, and goodness.     

French norms of imagery for pictures, for concrete and abstract words]

This paper deals with French norms for mental image versus picture agreement for 138 pictures and the imagery value for 138 concrete words and 69 abstract words. The pictures were selected from Snodgrass et Vanderwart's norms (1980). The concrete words correspond to the dominant naming response to the pictorial stimuli. The abstract words were taken from verbal associative norms published by Ferrand (2001). The norms were established according to two variables: 1) mental image vs. picture agreement, and 2) imagery value of words. Three other variables were controlled: 1) picture naming agreement; 2) familiarity of objects referred to in the pictures and the concrete words, and 3) subjective verbal frequency of words. The originality of this work is to provide French imagery norms for the three kinds of stimuli usually compared in research on dual coding. Moreover, these studies focus on figurative and verbal stimuli variations in visual imagery processes.     

Bigram statistics for 205 five-letter words having single-solution anagrams

To assist research in anagram solving, this paper presents bigram statistics for 205 five-letter words known to form single-solution anagrams. Imagery, concreteness, age-of-acquisition, familiarity, and meaningfulness values for these words have previously been published. The bigram statistics presented here include the bigram rank and GTZERO measures recently devised and tested by Mendelsohn (1976).     

Visual recognition thresholds and dimensions of word meaning

Tachistoscopic recognition thresholds were obtained for nouns with high or low values on one dimension of meaning while two others were controlled. Frequency, imagery concreteness (I), and meaningfulness (m), were varied in different lists in one experiment, frequency and m in a second, and m alone in a third. Ratings of familiarity were also obtained to supplement frequency as a measure of familiarity. The results showed that ease of visual recognition was most strongly related to frequency and familiarity. Imagery was unrelated to thresholds when familiarity and m were controlled. Meaningfulness showed a small but consistent positive relation to ease of recognition even with the other variables held constant. Except for the puzzling effect of m, the results are consistent with the view that perceptual recognition is primarily dependent upon the familiarity of the target stimulus and not upon associative processes evoked by it.     

Dates of entry and measures of imagery,concreteness, goodness,and familiarity for 1,046 words sampled from theOxford English Dictionary

TheOxford English Dictionary is the standard reference work for determining the earliest known instance of the occurrence of a word (its date of entry). Partly in order to facilitate research on the relation between the date of entry and other psychological variables, we gathered normative data on 1,046 words sampled from theOxford English Dictionary. We present data for scales that measure the imagery, concreteness, goodness, and familiarity values for words. These norms may also be of use to researchers who are not explicitly concerned with words’ date of entry, but who wish to sample words from a set that contains a large number of unfamiliar as well as familiar words.     

Effects of solution word attributes on anagram difficulty: A regression analysis

A sample of 45 student subjects provided solution scores for 80 five-letter anagrams. These scores were analysed as a function of solution word imagery, con-creteness, familiarity, objective frequency, age-of-acquisition and associative meaningfulness using multiple regression techniques. Two bigram measures together with number of vowels, nature of starting letter (vowel or consonant), anagram pronounceability and anagram-solution similarity scores were also entered into the regression equations. The bigram measures, the starting letter and anagram-solution similarity emerged as having significant associations with the solution scores. Previous reports of imagery effects in anagram are discussed in the light of the present results.     

Subjective frequency estimates for 2,938 monosyllabic words

Subjective frequency estimates for large sample of monosyllabic English words were collected from 574 young adults (undergraduate students) and from a separate group of 1,590 adults of varying ages and educational backgrounds. Estimates from the latter group were collected via the internet. In addition, 90 healthy older adults provided estimates for a random sample of 480 of these words. All groups rated words with respect to the estimated frequency of encounters of each word on a 7-point scale, ranging from never encountered to encountered several times a day. The young and older groups also rated each word with respect to the frequency of encounters in different perceptual domains (e.g., reading, hearing, writing, or speaking). The results of regression analyses indicated that objective log frequency and meaningfulness accounted for most of the variance in subjective frequency estimates, whereas neighborhood size accounted for the least amount of variance in the ratings. The predictive power of log frequency and meaningfulness were dependent on the level of subjective frequency estimates. Meaningfulness was a better predictor of subjective frequency for uncommon words, whereas log frequency was a better predictor of subjective frequency for common words. Our discussion focuses on the utility of subjective frequency estimates compared with other estimates of familiarity. The raw subjective frequency data for all words are available at http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/dbalota/labpub.html.     

Semantic processing in “associative” false memory

We studied the semantic properties of a class of illusions, of which the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm is the most prominent example, in which subjects falsely remember words that are associates of studied words. We analyzed DRM materials for 16 dimensions of semantic content and assessed the ability of these dimensions to predict interlist variability in false memory. For the more general class of illusions, we analyzed pairs of presented and unpresented words that varied in associative strength for the presence of these same 16 semantic properties. DRM materials proved to be exceptionally rich in meaning, as indexed by these semantic properties. Variability in false recall, false recognition, and backward associative strength loaded on a single semantic factor (familiarity/meaningfulness), whereas variability in true recall loaded on a quite different factor (imagery/concreteness). For word association generally, 15 semantic properties varied reliably with forward or backward association between words. Implications for semantic versus associative processing in this class of illusions, for dual-process theories, and for semantic properties of word associations are discussed. nt]mis|The present article was supported, in part, by grants from the National Institutes of Health (MH-061211) and the National Science Foundation (BCS 0553225) to C.J.B. and V.F.R., a grant from the National Cancer Institute (R13CA126359) to V.F.R., and a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council U.K. (RES-062-23-0452) to M.L.H.     

Words high and low in pleasantness as rated by male and female college students

No catalog of words currently available contains normative data for large numbers of words rated low or high in affect. A preliminary sample of 1,545 words was rated for pleasantness by 26–33 college students. Of these words, 274 were selected on the basis of their high or low ratings. These words, along with 125 others (Rubin, 1981), were then rated by additional groups of 62–76 college students on 5-point rating scales for the dimensions of pleasantness, imagery, and familiarity. The resulting mean ratings were highly correlated with the ratings obtained by other investigators using some of the same words. However, systematic differences in the ratings were found for male versus female raters. Females tended to use more extreme ratings than did males when rating words on the pleasantness scale. Also, females tended to rate words higher on the imagery and familiarity scales. Whether these sex differences in ratings represent cognitive differences between the sexes or merely differences in response style is a question that can be determined only by further research.     

Dissociated imageability,concreteness, and familiarity in lateralized word recognition

According to Paivio’s (1971) dual-coding theory, the representational memory of words is indexed by familiarity ratings, whereas associated imagery (one type of referential memory) is indexed by imageability and concreteness ratings. The theory predicts that word recognition near threshold will be influenced only by the former and not by the latter two attributes. However, previous empirical findings are unclear on this issue. Furthermore, the report of some studies that imageability and concreteness interact with the visual field of presentation pose a potential challenge to the theory. Here, five experiments present lateralized words whose semantic attributes are dissociated by design and by correlational analysis. In support of the theory, a metaanalysis shows that only familiarity affects overall recognition and that none of the attributes interacts with visual field. Yet statistical power to find the effects was high, and a general right-field recognition advantage supports the hemispheric validity of the findings. Implications for continuous (e.g., “cascade”) models of information processing are discussed.     

Word attributes and lateralization revisited: Implications for dual coding and discrete versus continuous processing

Three attributes of words are their imageability, concreteness, and familiarity. From a literature review and several experiments, I previously concluded (Boles, 1983a) that only familiarity affects the overall near-threshold recognition of words, and that none of the attributes affects right-visual-field superiority for word recognition. Here these conclusions are modified by two experiments demonstrating a critical mediating influence of intentional versus incidental memory instructions. In Experiment 1, subjects were instructed to remember the words they were shown, for subsequent recall. The results showed effects of both imageability and familiarity on overall recognition, as well as an effect of imageability on lateralization. In Experiment 2, word-memory instructions were deleted and the results essentially reinstated the findings of Boles (1983a). It is concluded that right-hemisphere imagery processes can participate in word recognition under intentional memory instructions. Within the dual coding theory (Paivio, 1971), the results argue that both discrete and continuous processing modes are available, that the modes can be used strategically, and that continuous processing can occur prior to response stages.     

Visual imagery ability and the recognition of verbal and nonverbal stimuli.

High and low visual imagers, defined as such primarily on the basis of spatial manipulation test performance, were required to identify tachistoscopically-presented pictures, concrete words, and abstract words varying in familiarity. Two recognition paradigms were employed, recognition threshold and recognition latency. High imagers were faster in picture recognition under both paradigms when a nonverbal set or strategy was primed and when pictures were relatively unfamiliar in the threshold paradigm. No relationship was found between imagery ability and word recognition in the visual modality, nor was visual imagery ability related to the auditory recognition of verbal and nonverbal stimuli, such as words and environmental sounds. Commonalities between these findings and others in the imagery ability literature were noted.