Subjective frequency and imageability ratings for 3,600 French nouns

Subjective frequency and imageability estimates for a sample of 3,600 French nouns were collected from two independent groups of 72 young adults each. Both groups received standard instructions and provided their ratings on a 7-point scale. The timing, sequencing, presentation of lexical stimuli, and recording of responses were controlled by a computer. All estimates of internal consistency and test—retest reliability (≥.98) confirm the high level of precision and reliability of the ratings. Correlations with ratings drawn from similar studies were found to be positive and significant for subjective frequency (r ≥ .85) and for imageability (r ≥ .69). Subjective frequency was positively and significantly correlated with objective frequency estimates drawn from 10 different sources (r ≥ .42). Subjective frequency and imageability were significantly correlated (r=.26), a relationship that was driven primarily by a sudden drop in imageability ratings for words with a subjective frequency rating below 2.5. The methodological implications of these findings are discussed. The ratings can be downloaded as supplemental materials from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Using the World-Wide Web to obtain large-scale word norms: 190,212 ratings on a set of 2,654 German nouns

This article presents a new database of 2,654 German nouns rated by a sample of 3,907 subjects on three psycholinguistic attributes: concreteness, valence, and arousal. As a new means of data collection in the field of psycholinguistic research, all ratings were obtained via the Internet, using a tailored Web application. Analysis of the obtained word norms showed good agreement with two existing norm sets. A cluster analysis revealed a plausible set of four classes of nouns: abstract concepts, aversive events, pleasant activities, and physical objects. In an additional application example, we demonstrate the usefulness of the database for creating parallel word lists whose elements match as closely as possible. The complete database is available for free from ftp://ftp.uni-duesseldorf.de/ pub/psycho/lahl/WWN. Moreover, the Web application used for data collection is inherently capable of collecting word norms in any language and is going to be released for public use as well.     

Imagery,concreteness, goodness,and familiarity ratings for 500 proverbs sampled from theOxford Dictionary of English Proverbs

Partly in order to facilitate research on the relation between some standard psychological variables, we gathered normative data on 500 proverbs sampled from theOxford Dictionary of English Proverbs (Wilson, 1970). The scales for which we gathered data are imagery, concreteness, goodness , and familiarity. These norms may be of value to researchers who wish to sample linguistic units larger than the word from a set that contains an extensive number of unfamiliar and familiar items. To illustrate the possible uses to which these data may be put, we presented a causal model of the relation between the four variables mentioned above.     

A basis for generating expectancies for verbs from nouns

We explore the implications of an event-based expectancy generation approach to language understanding, suggesting that one useful strategy employed by comprehenders is to generate expectations about upcoming words. We focus on two questions: (1) What role is played by elements other than verbs in generating expectancies? (2) What connection exists between expectancy generation and event-based knowledge? Because verbs follow their arguments in many constructions (particularly in verb-final languages), deferring expectations until the verb seems inefficient. Both human data and computational modeling suggest that other sentential elements may also play a role in predictive processing and that these constraints often reflect knowledge regarding typical events. We investigated these predictions, using both short and long stimulus onset asynchrony priming. Robust priming obtained when verbs were named aloud following typical agents, patients, instruments, and locations, suggesting that event memory is organized so that nouns denoting entities and objects activate the classes of events in which they typically play a role. These computations are assumed to be an important component of expectancy generation in sentence processing.     

Resolving semantically induced tip-of-the-tongue states for proper nouns

Three experiments are reported in which tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTSs) were induced in subjects by reading them pieces of item-specific information. In Experiments 1 and 2, subjects attempted to name famous people. These experiments showed that, in a TOTS, seeing a picture of the face of the target person did not facilitate naming, whereas the initials of the person's name did. In Experiment 3, a similar result was obtained with a landmark-naming task. The results of the experiments are discussed with reference to current models of memory structure and name retrieval.     

Metamemory for faces, names, and common nouns

This study examined the metacognitive aspects of face–name learning with the goal of providing a comprehensive profile of monitoring performance during this task. Four types of monitoring judgments were solicited during encoding and retrieval of novel face–name associations. Across all of the monitoring judgments, relative accuracy was significantly above chance for face and name targets. Furthermore, metamemory performance was similar between both target conditions, even though names were more difficult to recognize than faces. As a preliminary test of the stability of monitoring accuracy across different categories of stimuli, we also compared metamemory performance between face–name pairs and noun–noun pairs. Prospective monitoring accuracy was similar across the categories of stimuli, but retrospective monitoring accuracy was superior for noun targets compared with face or name targets. Altogether, our results indicate that participants can monitor their memory for face–name associations at a level above chance, and retrospective monitoring is more accurate with nouns compared with faces and names.     

In search of referents for nouns and pronouns

In comprehending a sentence, people normally try to identify the objects, events, and states referred to by its definite noun phrases. In Experiment 1, subjects took less time comprehending a sentence when the referents of such noun phrases were mentioned one sentence back than when they were mentioned two or three sentences back. There appeared to be a discontinuity between the first and second sentences back. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that it was most likely the first clause back, not the first sentence back, that was critical. These findings suggest that, independent of other factors, the last clause processed grants the entities it mentions a privileged place in working memory. They are readily available to be referred to by nouns and pronouns.     

Word naming times and psycholinguistic norms for Italian nouns

The present study describes normative measures for 626 Italian simple nouns. The database (LEXVAR. XLS) is freely available for down-loading on the Web site http://wwwistc.ip.rm.cnr.it/material/ database/. For each of the 626 nouns, values for the following variables are reported: age of acquisition, familiarity, imageability, concreteness, adult written frequency, child written frequency, adult spoken frequency, number of orthographic neighbors, mean bigram frequency, length in syllables, and length in letters. A classification of lexical stress and of the type of word-initial phoneme is also provided. The intercorrelations among the variables, a factor analysis, and the effects of variables and of the extracted factors on word naming are reported. Naming latencies were affected primarily by a factor including word length and neighborhood size and by a word frequency factor. Neither a semantic factor including imageability, concreteness, and age of acquisition nor a factor defined by mean bigram frequency had significant effects on pronunciation times. These results hold for a language with shallow orthography, like Italian, for which lexical nonsemantic properties have been shown to affect reading aloud. These norms are useful in a variety of research areas involving the manipulation and control of stimulus attributes.     

Affective norms for 210 British English and Finnish nouns

This article presents affective ratings for 210 British English and Finnish nouns, including taboo words. The norms were collected with 135 native British English and 304 native Finnish speakers, who rated the words according to their emotional valence, emotional charge, offensiveness, concreteness, and familiarity. The ratings between the two languages were found to be strongly correlated. The present ratings were also strongly correlated with the American English emotional valence and arousal ratings available in the Affective Norms for English Words database (Bradley & Lang, 1999) and the Janschewitz (2008) database for taboo words. These ratings will help researchers to select stimulus materials for a wide range of experiments involving both monolingual and bilingual processing of British English and Finnish emotional words. Materials associated with this article may be accessed as an online supplement from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Grammatical priming of inflected nouns

In normal linguistic usage, the inflected nouns of Sorbo-Croatian are usually preceded by prepositions that help to specify which particular grammatical case is intended and to stress the noun’s function in the sentence. In a lexical decision task, it was demonstrated that lexical decision times to nouns in a grammatical case that demands a preposition were faster when the preposition was appropriate to the case than when it was either inappropriate to the case or a nonsense syllable. This result lends support to the intuition that priming can occur among sentential components.     

Semantic context influences memory for verbs more than memory for nouns

Three experiments revealed that memory for verbs is more dependent on semantic context than is memory for nouns. The participants in Experiment 1 were asked to remember either nouns or verbs from intransitive sentences. A recognition test included verbatim sentences, sentences with an old noun and a new verb, sentences with an old verb and a new noun, and entirely new sentences. Memory for verbs was significantly better when the verb was presented with the same noun at encoding and at retrieval. This contextual effect was much smaller for nouns. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated this effect and provided evidence that context effects reflect facilitation from bringing to mind the same meaning of a verb at encoding and at retrieval. Memory for verbs may be more dependent on semantic context because the meanings of verbs are more variable across semantic contexts than are the meanings of nouns.     

Memory for pure and verb-derived nouns: implications for hemispheric specialization

Memory for pure and verb-derived nouns was assessed in two long-term memory experiments. The two types of nouns were matched for word frequency and number of syllables. The results of both experiments indicated that pure and verb-derived nouns do not differ in their demands on the information processing capacities of normal subjects when confounding factors are controlled. The implications of these findings for studies of hemispheric specialization for language are discussed.     

A rasch model for continuous ratings

A unidimensional latent trait model for continuous ratings is developed. This model is an extension of Andrich's rating formulation which assumes that the response process at latent thresholds is governed by the dichotomous Rasch model. Item characteristic functions and information functions are used to illustrate that the model takes ceiling and floor effects into account. Both the dichotomous Rasch model and a linear model with normally distributed error can be derived as limiting cases. The separability of the structural and incidental parameters is demonstrated and a procedure for estimating the parameters is outlined.     

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/.     

Age-of-acquisition ratings for 30,000 English words

We present age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 30,121 English content words (nouns, verbs, and adjectives). For data collection, this megastudy used the Web-based crowdsourcing technology offered by the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our data indicate that the ratings collected in this way are as valid and reliable as those collected in laboratory conditions (the correlation between our ratings and those collected in the lab from U.S. students reached .93 for a subsample of 2,500 monosyllabic words). We also show that our AoA ratings explain a substantial percentage of the variance in the lexical-decision data of the English Lexicon Project, over and above the effects of log frequency, word length, and similarity to other words. This is true not only for the lemmas used in our rating study, but also for their inflected forms. We further discuss the relationships of AoA with other predictors of word recognition and illustrate the utility of AoA ratings for research on vocabulary growth.     

Four semantic layers of common nouns

This article proposes a four-layer semantic structure for common nouns. Each layer matches up with a semantic entity of a certain type in Montague’s intensional semantics. It is argued that a common noun denotes a sense and a concept, which are functions. For any given context, the sense of a term determines its extensions and the concept denoted by the term specifies its intensions. Intensions are treated as sets of senses. The membership relation between a sense and an intension is a soft kind and is expressed in the form of a generic sentence. Such a layered structure explains various “degrees of publicity” of a language. The result we present clarifies the confusions existing in the ordinary understanding of “sense,” “intension,” and “concept.” It also has promising applications in interpreting metaphors and revealing the relationship between generics and metaphors.     

What compound nouns mean to preschool children

Compound nouns have multiple meanings in English. The purpose of this study was to explore when children know that compound nouns refer to two objects, one ideally interacting with the other (e.g., "fish shoes" are shoes with fish on them, not next to them). Thirty-five English-speaking three- and four-year-old children participated in this study. They were given both a production and comprehension task with novel compound nouns. The results showed that the three-year-olds and the four-year-olds were equally likely to produce compounds to name two interacting objects. However, the three-year-olds were less likely than the four-year-olds to understand that a compound referred necessarily to two objects. These results demonstrate that children's knowledge of the meaning of compound nouns is still developing in the preschool years. Three possible interpretations of the mismatch in comprehension and production are discussed: (1). there are modality differences in processing by children, (2). the meaning tapped by production and comprehension is not identical, and (3). the tasks differed in complexity.