Extensions of the Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) norms.

The Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) norms for 925 nouns were extended in two ways. The first extension involved the collecting of a much more extensive and diverse set of properties from original ratings and other sources. Factor analysis of 32 properties identified 9 orthogonal factors and demonstrated both the redundancy among various measures and the tendency for some attributes (e.g., age of acquisition) to load on multiple factors. The second extension collected basic ratings of imagery, familiarity, and a new age of acquisition measure for a larger pool of 2,311 words, including parts of speech other than nouns. The analysis of these ratings and supplementary statistics computed for the words (e.g., number of syllables, Kucera-Francis frequency) demonstrated again the relative independence of various measures and the importance of obtaining diverse properties for such norms. Implications and directions for future research are considered. The full set of new norms may be downloaded from www. psychonomic.org/archive/.     

First-order approximation to English,second-order approximation to English,and orthographic neighbor ratio norms for 925 nouns

First- and second-order approximations to English and orthographic neighbor ratio values are provided for Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan’s (1968) 925 nouns. First- and second-order approximations to English are information theory measures of the probability of generating a word on a letter-by-letter basis. The orthographic neighbor ratio is the frequency of a word divided by the sum of the frequencies of all words that can be generated by changing one of its letters. Thus, the orthographic neighbor ratio provides a measure of a sophisticated guessing model in which partial information about a word is obtained and a decision is made on the basis of the relative frequencies of the possible responses. Correlations with existing norms are reported.     

Personality differences in mental imagery and the effects on verbal memory

This study examined the effects of extraversion and neuroticism on participants’ reported vividness of visual imagery and on their memory performance for concrete and abstract nouns. Groups of extraverts (n = 15) and introverts (n = 15) were selected from a larger original sample and asked to remember a series of concrete and abstract nouns, including a set of lexically ambiguous concrete homonyms (e.g., earth = 1. planet, 2. soil). Extraverts reported more vivid imagery than introverts but this did not translate into better recall for extraverts, even for concrete stimuli. Recall was best for unambiguous concrete nouns, followed by concrete homonyms, then abstract nouns. While initial analyses suggested that there was an interaction between extraversion and the type of word presented, later analyses revealed that neuroticism was the main driver in differences in recall between different word types. While differences in recall were best explained by context availability theory (Schwanenflugel, 1991) rather than dual coding theory (Paivio, 1991), questions remain about the power of either theory to explain the role of individual differences in personality on recall, particularly given that imagery vividness effects were related to extraversion while differences in recall were related to neuroticism. The implications of these findings for future research and theoretical development are discussed.     

Measures of free recall of 900 English nouns: Correlations with imagery,concreteness, meaningfulness,and frequency

Forty groups of subjects were given six lists of 25 nouns each for immediate free written recall. A measure of free recall was thereby obtained for each of 900 nouns in the Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) norms, each noun’s measure based on the recall of 32 subjects. First-order correlations showed recall to be correlated with imagery, concreteness, meaningfulness, Thorndike-Lorge frequency, and Kuěra-Francis frequency. Partial correlations showed meaningfulness to be essentially unrelated to recall and concreteness only moderately related. In contrast to previous comparisons, which were based on smaller ranges of frequency and were more susceptible to list-specific effects, imagery and frequency were found to be approximately equal in their influence on free recall.     

The Toronto Word Pool: Norms for imagery,concreteness, orthographic variables,and grammatical usage for 1,080 words

Imagery and concreteness norms and percentage noun usage were obtained on the 1,080 verbal items from the Toronto Word Pool. Imagery was defined as the rated ease with which a word aroused a mental image, and concreteness was defined in relation to level of abstraction. The degree to which a word was functionally a noun was estimated in a sentence generation task. The mean and standard deviation of the imagery and concreteness ratings for each item are reported together with letter and printed frequency counts for the words and indications of sex differences in the ratings. Additional data in the norms include a grammatical function code derived from dictionary definitions, a percent noun judgment, indexes of statistical approximation to English, and an orthographic neighbor ratio. Validity estimates for the imagery and concreteness ratings are derived from comparisons with scale values drawn from the Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) noun pool and the Toglia and Battig (1978) norms.     

An additional measure of availability derived from theOxford English Dictionary

In order to develop an additional measure of availability for the nouns from Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan’s (1968) list, we used a CD-ROM version of theOxford English Dictionary (OED) to obtain the number of times a word was used to define other words. This variable was added to Rubin and Friendly’s (1986) set of measures for these words. In multiple regression analyses, our measure proved to be a useful predictor of free recall. These results suggest that the OED may be useful for providing additional psycholinguistic measures.     

Negation as a means for emotion regulation? Startle reflex modulation during processing of negated emotional words

This study investigated startle reflex modulation in 33 healthy student participants during the processing of negated emotional items. To build upon previous research, our particular interest was to find out whether processing of negated emotional items modulates emotional responding in line with the logical meaning of the negated expression, or instead leads to paradox emotional effects that point in the direction opposite the one logically implied by the negation. Startle reflex modulation was assessed during silent reading of pleasant and unpleasant nouns. The nouns were either paired with the possessive pronoun my or with the negation word no. The startle eyeblink amplitude was enhanced during processing of the unpleasant pronoun–noun phrases and attenuated during processing of the pleasant phrases. Negation attenuated the startle eyeblink for negated unpleasant nouns and enhanced it for negated pleasant nouns. In line with this finding, negation decreased arousal ratings for unpleasant nouns and reversed the valence ratings for pleasant nouns. Our results are the first to show an effect of negation on both peripheral physiological and subjective indices of affective responding. Our results suggest that negation may be an effective strategy for spontaneous down-regulation of emotional responses to unpleasant, but not to pleasant, stimuli.     

Reproducing affective norms with lexical co-occurrence statistics: Predicting valence,arousal, and dominance

Human ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance are frequently used to study the cognitive mechanisms of emotional attention, word recognition, and numerous other phenomena in which emotions are hypothesized to play an important role. Collecting such norms from human raters is expensive and time consuming. As a result, affective norms are available for only a small number of English words, are not available for proper nouns in English, and are sparse in other languages. This paper investigated whether affective ratings can be predicted from length, contextual diversity, co-occurrences with words of known valence, and orthographic similarity to words of known valence, providing an algorithm for estimating affective ratings for larger and different datasets. Our bootstrapped ratings achieved correlations with human ratings on valence, arousal, and dominance that are on par with previously reported correlations across gender, age, education and language boundaries. We release these bootstrapped norms for 23,495 English words.     

How Polysemy Affects Concreteness Ratings: The Case of Metaphor

Concreteness ratings are frequently used in a variety of disciplines to operationalize differences between concrete and abstract words and concepts. However, most ratings studies present items in isolation, thereby overlooking the potential polysemy of words. Consequently, ratings for polysemous words may be conflated, causing a threat to the validity of concreteness‐ratings studies. This is particularly relevant to metaphorical words, which typically describe something abstract in terms of something more concrete. To investigate whether perceived concreteness ratings differ for metaphorical versus non‐metaphorical word meanings, we obtained concreteness ratings for 96 English nouns from 230 participants. Results show that nouns are perceived as less concrete when a metaphorical (versus non‐metaphorical) meaning is triggered. We thus recommend taking metaphoricity into account in future concreteness‐ratings studies to further improve the quality and reliability of such studies, as well as the consistency of the empirical studies that rely on these ratings.     

Subjective frequency norms for 330 Spanish simple and compound words

Ratings were collected from 102 native speakers of Spanish on the subjective frequency of occurrence of 330 Spanish words, including 120 deverbal compounds and their constituents. These ratings were found to be highly reliable, whether items were analyzed together or separately by type (i.e., compounds, nouns, verbs), as evidenced by indexes of internal consistency and test-retest reliability that were equal to or greater than.98. The validity of the normative ratings was attested to by statistically significant correlations with objective frequency, estimated at.63 for all items together, and.41,.51, and.78 for compounds, nouns, and verbs, respectively. Among the substantive issues addressed was the potential dependency in ratings for compounds and their associated verb-noun constituents. No relationship was discerned, supporting the idea that compound and constituent ratings are statistically independent in this experimental task. The theoretical and methodological implications of the findings are discussed. The ratings can be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Imagery rating and recall in congenitally blind subjects.

Imagery ratings, incidental free recall, and intentional free recall of a group of young congenitally blind adults living in an institute for the blind and of control group were compared. Words to be rated and recalled belonged to three categories: (a) high-imagery words whose referents can be sensorially experienced also by the blind; (b) high-imagery words whose referents cannot be experienced; and (c) low-imagery words. In the control group, both ratings of imagery and recall were affected by the category to which the word belonged. For the blind group the category of the word affected only the ratings of imagery which still assumed a peculiar form since words in category b received extremely low ratings. It is concluded that the blind can evaluate the imagery value of a word, but that their recall is not affected by the level of its imagery value. Therefore, the imagery value really seems to describe, as Paivio asserts, the susceptibility of an item to being coded in a specific visuo-imaginal way, which is more available for sighted than for blind people.     

Imageability and distributional typicality measures of nouns and verbs in contemporary English

Dissociations between noun and verb processing are not uncommon after brain injury; yet, precise psycholinguistic comparisons of nouns and verbs are hampered by the underrepresentation of verbs in published semantic word norms and by the absence of contemporary estimates for part-of-speech usage. We report herein imageability ratings and rating response times (RTs) for 1,197 words previously categorized as pure nouns, pure verbs, or words of balanced noun-verb usage on the basis of the Francis and Ku?era (1982) norms. Nouns and verbs differed in rated imageability, and there was a stronger correspondence between imageability rating and RT for nouns than for verbs. For all word types, the image-rating-RT function implied that subjects employed an image generation process to assign ratings. We also report a new measure of noun-verbtypicality that used the Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL; Lund & Burgess, 1996) context vectors (derived from a large sample of Usenet text) to compute the mean context distance between each word and all of thepure nouns andpure verbs. For a subset of the items, the resulting HAL noun-verb difference score was compared with part-of-speech usage in a representative sample of the Usenet corpus. It is concluded that this score can be used to estimate the extent to which a given word occurs in typical noun or verb sentence contexts in informal contemporary English discourse. The item statistics given in Appendix B will enable experimenters to select representative examples of nouns and verbs or to compare typical with atypical nouns (or verbs), while holding constant or covarying rated imageability.     

Dutch modality exclusivity norms: Simulating perceptual modality in space

Perceptual information is important for the meaning of nouns. We present modality exclusivity norms for 485 Dutch nouns rated on visual, auditory, haptic, gustatory, and olfactory associations. We found these nouns are highly multimodal. They were rated most dominant in vision, and least in olfaction. A factor analysis identified two main dimensions: one loaded strongly on olfaction and gustation (reflecting joint involvement in flavor), and a second loaded strongly on vision and touch (reflecting joint involvement in manipulable objects). In a second study, we validated the ratings with similarity judgments. As expected, words from the same dominant modality were rated more similar than words from different dominant modalities; but – more importantly – this effect was enhanced when word pairs had high modality strength ratings. We further demonstrated the utility of our ratings by investigating whether perceptual modalities are differentially experienced in space, in a third study. Nouns were categorized into their dominant modality and used in a lexical decision experiment where the spatial position of words was either in proximal or distal space. We found words dominant in olfaction were processed faster in proximal than distal space compared to the other modalities, suggesting olfactory information is mentally simulated as “close” to the body. Finally, we collected ratings of emotion (valence, dominance, and arousal) to assess its role in perceptual space simulation, but the valence did not explain the data. So, words are processed differently depending on their perceptual associations, and strength of association is captured by modality exclusivity ratings.     

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.     

Imagery: A multidimensional construct

Two sets of words were independently rated for imagery. Each set of words contained concrete nouns, e.g., bell, and adjectives, e.g., yellow, as well as nouns and adjectives describing affects, e.g., angry, and physical states, e.g., hungry. Factor analysis of the ratings indicated two factors or sources of variance in each set of words. These were interpreted as a Visual factor, and an Experienced States factor. These results indicated that imagery ratings are best conceptualized as reflections of multiple modes of imagining rather than ease of visualization alone.     

Formal distinctiveness of high- and low-imageability nouns: analyses and theoretical implications

Words associated with perceptually salient, highly imageable concepts are learned earlier in life, more accurately recalled, and more rapidly named than abstract words (R. W. Brown, 1976; Walker & Hulme, 1999). Theories accounting for this concreteness effect have focused exclusively on semantic properties of word referents. A novel possibility is that word structure may also contribute to the effect. We report a corpus-based analysis of the phonological and morphological structures of a large set of nouns with imageability ratings (N = 2,023). High- and low-imageability nouns differed by length, etymology, prosody, affixation, phonological neighborhood density, and rates of consonant clustering. On average, nouns denoting abstract concepts were longer, more derivationally complex, and emerged in English from a different distribution of languages than did concrete nouns. We address implications for interactivity of word form and meaning as pertain to theories of word concreteness, lexical acquisition, and word processing.     

Concept Abstractness and the Representation of Noun–Noun Combinations

Research on noun–noun combinations has been largely focusing on concrete concepts. Three experiments examined the role of concept abstractness in the representation of noun–noun combinations. In Experiment 1, participants provided written interpretations for phrases constituted by nouns of varying degrees of abstractness. Interpretive focus (the modifier, the head noun, or both) for each noun–noun phrase was evaluated. In Experiment 2, a different group of participants directly indicated which noun, the modifier or the head noun, was the focus of the meaning of each noun–noun phrase. Finally, participants in Experiment 3 assessed similarity of noun–noun phrases with overlapping modifiers. If abstractness of constituent nouns affects information distribution between modifier and head noun, it would accordingly affect similarity ratings for noun–noun phrases with overlapping modifiers. Results showed that the pattern of information distribution within a noun–noun phrase differed between phrases with abstract head nouns and phrases with concrete head nouns. Specifically, the center of representation was more on the head noun side for phrases with concrete head nouns, whereas the center seemed to shift to the direction of the modifier for phrases with abstract head nouns. Some issues related to effects of concept abstractness on noun–noun combinations are discussed.     

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.     

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.     

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.