Four continuous word associations to each of 107 homographs were obtained from 50 male and 50 female undergraduates. Included in the word sample were 12 nonhomophonic homographs (heterophones). The data were analyzed to derive two indexes. A dominance score was defined on the basis of the frequency that a particular meaning was associated to each homograph. A stability score was a measure of the likelihood that the continuous associations were consistent with the first associate. Norms were provided for these measures. Comparison of heterophones to homophones indicates that the former are significantly more stable.

The purpose of this research was to establish norms for the relative frequency of use of

Attributes associated with concept representations, such as familiarity, typicality, and age of acquisition, have been shown to be important influences on lexical-semantic processing. In most previous studies of healthy and pathological aging, these attributes are not equated for younger and older adults separately on the stimuli used. In this study, normative data were collected to test whether there exist any age differences in these attributes. The results demonstrate that the ratings given by younger and older adults on natural and manmade category items correlated positively. However, age differences were also apparent, whereby older adults provided higher ratings overall than younger adults. Suggestions and hypotheses are presented to explain this pattern of age differences, which relate to how category concepts may be represented by healthy younger and older adults. Also, the possible implications for these differential age ratings on lexical-semantic processing are discussed. The age differences apparent in this study demonstrate the need to consider age-appropriate normative ratings in the selection of stimuli for use in lexical-semantic processing studies of aging, and the normative data presented provide a means of equating category stimuli. The complete list of all the means is available at www.psychonomic.org/archive.

The set of names corresponding to the pictures from Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) were screen fragmented by means of a series of procedures implemented in Microsoft QuickBasic on a Macintosh microcomputer. Words were screen fragmented by deleting blocks of pixels from their images rather than by deleting individual letters. The screen-fragmentation procedure is particularly useful for the present set of words, in which a large proportion ofthe names of the pictures are short (fewer than five letters). The screen-fragmentation procedure can produce any number of fragmentation levels. In the present implementation, eight levels of fragmented images were produced, to correspond to the eight levels available for the Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures.

The aim of the present study was to expand the scope of category norm and typicality data to include verbs for use when investigating semantic memory in fields such as linguistics, psychology, and aphasiology. Two experiments were conducted. In the first, participants were asked to list verbs within 10 semantic categories (e.g. breaking, cleaning, cooking, etc.) and 10 noun categories (e.g. animals, fruit, tools, etc.). In the second experiment, participants were asked to rate the typicality of verbs within 8 of the previously investigated verb categories. Although participants listed fewer verbs in verb categories than nouns in noun categories, the overall patterns with regard to correlation analyses between production frequency, mean rank of responses, lexical frequency, and typicality were consistent with those observed in noun categories. These patterns are also consistent with those observed in previous research. Potential similarities and differences between nouns and verbs, as well as future applications of such data, are discussed.

Orthographic transparency refers to the systematicity in the mapping between orthographic letter sequences and phonological phoneme sequences in both directions, for reading and spelling. Measures of transparency previously used in the analysis of orthographies of other languages include regularity, consistency, and entropy. However, previous reports have typically been hampered by severe restrictions, such as using only monosyllables or only word-initial phonemes. Greek is sufficiently transparent to allow complete sequential alignment between graphemes and phonemes, therefore permitting full analyses at both letter and grapheme levels, using every word in its entirety. Here, we report multiple alternative measures of transparency, using both type and token counts, and compare these with estimates for other languages. We discuss the problems stemming from restricted analysis sets and the implications for psycholinguistic experimentation and computational modeling of reading and spelling.

Four hundred forty-eight children 3-12 years of age generated category exemplars for 33 distinct categories. The percentage of the participants reporting each exemplar, the percentage of the participants reporting each exemplar first, the percentage of the participants reporting each exemplar across age groups (3-5 years, 6-8 years, and 9-12 years), and the mean rank of each exemplar are presented. A full version of the 29 category norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Few tools for research in proper names have been available--specifically, there is no large-scale corpus of proper names. Two corpora of proper names were constructed, one based on U.S. phone book listings, the other derived from a database of Usenet text. Name frequencies from both corpora were compared with human subjects' reaction times (RTs) to the proper names in a naming task. Regression analysis showed that the Usenet frequencies contributed to predictions of human RT, whereas phone book frequencies did not. In addition, semantic neighborhood density measures derived from the HAL corpus were compared with the subjects' RTs and found to be a better predictor of RT than was frequency in either corpus. These new corpora are freely available on line for download. Potentials for these corpora range from using the names as stimuli in experiments to using the corpus data in software applications.

Obtained ratings from 703 undergraduates for a sample of 192 surnames selected randomly from a large metropolitan area phone book. Measures of reliability and the intercorrelations among the various measures indicate that the present information may be useful for investigations of learning and remembering names. While certain unique aspects of name stimuli may have important advantages for researchers of verbal processes, the present ratings should also prove useful to personality and social psychologists when names are of interest. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

The idea that at least some aspects of word meaning can be induced from patterns of word co-occurrence is becoming increasingly popular. However, there is less agreement about the precise computations involved, and the appropriate tests to distinguish between the various possibilities. It is important that the effect of the relevant design choices and parameter values are understood if psychological models using these methods are to be reliably evaluated and compared. In this article, we present a systematic exploration of the principal computational possibilities for formulating and validating representations of word meanings from word co-occurrence statistics. We find that, once we have identified the best procedures, a very simple approach is surprisingly successful and robust over a range of psychologically relevant evaluation measures.

We present a set of translation norms for 670 English and 760 Spanish nouns, verbs and class ambiguous items that varied in their lexical properties in both languages, collected from 80 bilingual participants. Half of the words in each language received more than a single translation across participants. Cue word frequency and imageability were both negatively correlated with number of translations. Word class predicted number of translations: Nouns had fewer translations than did verbs, which had fewer translations than class-ambiguous items. The translation probability of specific responses was positively correlated with target word frequency and imageability, and with its form overlap with the cue word. Translation choice was modulated by L2 proficiency: Less proficient bilinguals tended to produce lower probability translations than more proficient bilinguals, but only in forward translation, from Ll to L2. These findings highlight the importance of translation ambiguity as a factor influencing bilingual representation and performance. The norms can also provide an important resource to assist researchers in the selection of experimental materials for studies of bilingual and monolingual language performance. These norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

The present study presents normative measures for 260 line drawings of everyday objects, found in Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980), viewed by individuals in China and the United States. Within each cultural group, name agreement, concept agreement, and familiarity measures were obtained separately for younger adults and older adults. For a subset of 57 pictures (22{\%}), there was equivalence in both name agreement and concept agreement, and for an additional subset of 29 pictures (11{\%}), there was nonequivalent name agreement but equivalent concept agreement, across all culture-by-age groups. The data indicate substantial differences across culture-by-age groups in name agreement percentages and number of distinct name responses provided. We discovered significant differences between older and younger American adults in both name agreement percentages (67 pictures, or 26{\%}) and concept agreement percentages (44 pictures, or 17{\%}). Written naming responses collected for the entire set of Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures showed shifts in both naming and concept agreement percentages over the intervening decades: Although correlations in name agreement were strong (r = .71, p {\textless} .001) between our younger American samples and those of Snodgrass and Vanderwart, name agreement percentages have changed for a substantial proportion (33{\%}) of the 260 pictures; moreover, 63{\%} of the stimuli for which Snodgrass and Vanderwart reported concept agreement now appear to differ. We provide comprehensive comparison statistics and tests for both the present study and prior ones, finding differences across numerous item-level measures. The corpus of data suggests that substantial differences in all measures can be found across age as well as culture, so that unequivocal conclusions with respect to cross-cultural or age-related differences in cognition can be made only when appropriate stimuli are selected for studies. Data for all 260 pictures, for each of the four groups, and all supporting materials and tests are freely archived at http://agingmind.cns.uiuc.edu/Pict{\_}Norms. The full set of these norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

We summarize five studies of our large-scale research program, in which we examined aspects of contour-based object identification and segmentation, and we report on the stimuli we used, the norms and data we collected, and the software tools we developed. The stimuli were outlines derived from the standard set of line drawings of everyday objects by Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980). We used contour curvature as a major variable in all the studies. The total number of 1,500 participants produced very solid, normative identification rates of silhouettes and contours, straight-line versions, and fragmented versions, and quite reliable benchmark data about saliency of points and object segmentation into parts. We also developed several software tools to generate stimuli and to analyze the data in nonstandard ways. Our stimuli, norms and data, and software tools have great potential for further exploration of factors influencing contour-based object identification, and are also useful for researchers in many different disciplines (including computer vision) on a wide variety of research topics (e.g., priming, agnosia, perceptual organization, and picture naming). The full set of norms, data, and stimuli may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

The MRCmachine-usable dictionary contains 150,837 words and up 26 linguistic and psycholin- guistic attributes for each. The attributes are from sources that are publicly available but are difficult to obtain and structure into a single dictionary, Three utility programs are described that permit the selection of words defined by a set of specified attribute values and the selection of attribute values for a set of specified words. These programs permit the construction of word sets for psycholinguistic experiments that control for the attributes specified in the dictionary. The dictionary may also be of use to researchers in artificial intelligence and computer science who require psychological and linguistic descriptions of words.

Examined familiarity and relatedness among homograph meanings, particularly subordinate meanings, for 110 common English words. 160 undergraduates completed a meaning collection task, and the number of meanings provided for words varied widely. In a familiarity rating task, 42 Ss rated each meaning on its familiarity. Familiarity ratings were more sensitive than meaning collection to knowledge of subordinate meanings. In a comparison task, 125 Ss made relatedness judgments for all meaning pairs within each word. Results provide a database of complex relationships among word meanings that can be used to investigate the effects of relatedness and other semantic variables. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2000 APA, all rights reserved)

We present new Spanish norms for object familiarity and rated age of acquisition for 140 pictures taken from Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980), together with data on visual complexity, image agreement, name agreement, word length (in syllables and phonemes), and five measures of word frequency. The pictures were presented to a group of 64 Spanish subjects, and oral naming latencies were recorded. In a multiple regression analysis, age of acquisition, object familiarity, name agreement, word frequency, and word length made significant independent contributions to predicting naming latency.

A set of full-color images of objects is described for use in experiments investigating the effects of in-depth rotation on the identification of three-dimensional objects. The corpus contains up to 11 perspective views of 70 nameable objects. We also provide ratings of the "goodness" of each view, based on Thurstonian scaling of subjects' preferences in a paired-comparison experiment. An exploratory cluster analysis on the scaling solutions indicates that the amount of information available in a given view generally is the major determinant of the goodness of the view. For instance, objects with an elongated front-back axis tend to cluster together, and the front and back views of these objects, which do not reveal the object's major surfaces and features, are evaluated as the worst views.

In this article, we present 84 nonobjects we created by using the colored object pictures from Rossion and Pourtois (2004). These nonobjects were explored on a number of measures, including object resemblance, visual complexity, and an object decision task (ODT). Object resemblance for nonobjects is a construct comparable to the "word-likeness" of phonotactically legal pseudowords. The nonobjects were rated as possible objects, showing similarity to real objects. Visual complexity ratings for objects and nonobjects were comparable. In the ODT, response times (RTs) were significantly longer for nonobjects than for real-object pictures. This RT difference is analogous to the word advantage, or lexicality effect, found in lexical decision tasks, in which responses for words are generally faster than those for nonwords. This nonobject set is freely available and has the advantage of having a companion set of real-object pictures. The nonobjects are available in color and in grayscale from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

The ESPbase provides a tool for storing symbols and icons along with information about their characteristics. Information about a wide range of symbol characteristics is included on the database to facilitate the selection of symbol sets for research and design. The database includes information about the graphical characteristics and functions of symbols. It also includes ratings of symbol concreteness, complexity, familiarity, and meaningfulness. Symbols and icons can be accessed on the basis of each of these characteristics or any combination of characteristics. This makes it easier to select symbols on the basis of usability and design requirements. It also means that symbols can be easily selected for research while controlling their characteristics on a number of dimensions.

A full upper- and lowercase visual similarity matrix is presented for a standard set of com- puter characters, implemented on the Apple-Psych system. The 2,704 (52 × 52) letter pairs were rated by 12 subjects each. From the ratings, generation and veridical similarity values are derived, and they are tabled for use in research on mixed-case letter matching. In addition, the results of multidimensional scaling and cluster analyses are presented, which give complementary, simplified descriptions of the data.

Confusion matrices were compiled for uppercase letters and for braille characters presented to observers in two ways: as raised touch stimuli and as visual stimuli that had been optically filtered of their higher spatial frequencies. These and other existing matrices were subjected to a number of analyses, including the choice model and hierarchical clustering. The strong similarity of the visual and tactile matrices from this study lends additional support to the claim that visual recognition of low-pass filtered characters, to a first approximation, can be taken as a model of tactile recognition of small two-dimensional raised patterns. Besides this, the analysis questions the widely held assumption that response bias contributes significantly to the stimulus-response contingencies in a character-recognition task.

Block capital letters were displayed to experienced and inexperienced Ss, using a 20 x 20 matrix of vibratory tactors placed against the back. In two separate experiments, a total of five modes of stimulus presentation. three of them employing a linear scanning slit, were studied. The poorest method, stationary flashing of the letter, allows performance that is well above chance, implying that a purely spatial presentation does convey information. Performance is improved when the letter is moved horizontally across the display. The best performance is achieved when the amount of simultaneous stimulation is limited by using a linear scanning slit. In one method, the letter moves behind a stationary slit, with the result that its horizontal dimension is portrayed only in time. In the other two methods, the scanning slit moves across the stationary letter, portraying the letter both in time and in space. The results of all five display modes indicate that Ss can use whichever representation, spatial or temporal, is available, although patternings which most closely approximate sequential tracing by a single moving point lead to the highest recognition accuracy. We interpret these results in terms of the limited spatial resolution of the cutaneous sense. While the perception of a letter presented in either full-field condition is limited by the spatial resolution, the best measure being the two-point limen, the perception of a letter traced sequentially is limited by the localization acuity of the cutaneous sense, the best measure being the "error of localization," which is known to be considerably smaller than the two-point limen. Inasmuch as the slit methods of presentation are a compromise between simultaneous and sequential display, letter-recognition accuracy ia better with slit presentation than with the corresponding full-field mode of display.

In Experiment 1, separate samples rated nouns on danger, using either an online survey or the same survey in person. In Experiment 2, a single sample rated words on familiarity, using both methods. Women's in-person and online ratings correlated significantly better than men's. In-person ratings correlated significantly better with existing norms in 4 of 8 instances. There were significant effects of condition on mean ratings and completion times. Ratings from participants who withdrew from the experiment correlated significantly less well with existing norms than did ratings from those who completed the whole experiment, in 12 of 16 instances. Analysis of existing data showed that a different statistical conclusion is reached depending on whether in-person or online ratings are used. Furthermore, the categorization of 17.9{\%} (Experiment 1) and 5.3{\%} (Experiment 2) of the items as high or low depends on which ratings are used. Ratings gathered in person and online cannot be freely substituted.

A digital signal-processing (DSP) technique for rapid generation of complex auditory motion stimuli based on dynamic linear changes in interaural delay is described. In this technique, a pair of complementary discrete Fourier transforms (DFTs) for which the component spacing in one series is different than that of the other is used. The appeal of this technique is its wide applicability, since it can generate real-time motion stimuli of any velocity and starting interaural delay for complex broadband or filtered noise waveforms and nonstationary sounds such as speech, music, and other natural sounds.

A Web-based coding application was designed to improve coding efficiency and to provide a systematic means of evaluating responses to open-ended assessments. The system was developed for use by multiple raters to assign open-ended responses to predetermined categories. The application provides a software environment for efficiently supervising the work of coders and evaluating the quality of the coding by (1) systematically presenting open-ended responses to coders, (2) tracking each coder's categorized responses, and (3) assessing interrater consistency at any time in order to identify coders in need of further training. In addition, the application can be set to automatically assign repeated responses to categories previously identified as appropriate for those responses. To evaluate the efficacy of the coding application and to determine the statistical reliability of coding open-ended data within this application, we examined data from two empirical studies. The results demonstrated substantial interrater agreement on items assigned to various categories across free and controlled association tasks. Overall, this new coding application provides a feasible method of reliably coding open-ended data and makes the task of coding these data more manageable. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

A study was undertaken to acquire a confusion matrix of the entire upper-case English alphabet with a simple nonserifed font under tachistoscopic conditions. This was accomplished with two experimental conditions, one with blank poststimulus field and one with noisy poststimulus field, for six Ss run 650 trials each. Three mathematical models of recognition, two based on the concept of a finite number of sensory states and one being the choice model, were compared in their ability to predict the confusion matrix after their parameters were estimated from functions of the data. In order to ascertain the facility with which estimates of similarity among the letters could lead to a psychological space containing the letters, $\eta$ ij, the similarity parameter of the choice model was input to an ordinally based multidimensional scaling program. Finally, correlation coefficients were computed among parameters of the models, the scaled space, and a crude measure of physical similarity. Briefly, the results were: (1) the finite-state model that assumed stimulus similarity (the overlap activation model) and the choice model predicted the confusion-matrix entries about equally well in terms of a sum-of-squared deviations criterion and better than the all-or-none activation model, which assumed only a perfect perception or random-guessing state following a stimulus presentation; (2) the parts of the confusion matrix that fit best varied with the particular model, and this finding was related to the models; (3) the best scaling result in terms of a goodness-of-fit measure was obtained with the blank poststimulus field condition, with a technique allowing different distances for tied similarity values, and with the Euclidean as opposed to the city-block metric; and (4) there was agreement among the models in terms of the way in which the models reflected sensory and response bias structure in the data, and in the way in which a single model measured these attributes across experimental conditions, as well as agreement among similarity ami distance measures with physical Similarity. {\textcopyright} 1971 Psychonomic Society, Inc.

In 1980, Bloom and Fischler published a paper describing a set of sentence contexts (SCs) and their cloze probabilities (CPs). This material has subsequently been employed in numerous studies of linguistic processing. We sought to define the completion words and their CPs for Bloom and Fischler's sentences in an inner-city British population in order to establish reliable norms for subsequent studies in the U.K. One hundred and fifty incomplete SCs were presented to 73 volunteers. The CPs for each of the words used to complete the SCs were computed. We then compared the CPs from our sample with those from Bloom and Fischler. There were significant differences between CPs from each sample in 14{\%} of the SCs analyzed (p {\textless} .01). Our data suggest that studies employing SCs and CPs may require locally defined norms if the test population differs substantially from the original one. The consequences of employing SCs and CPs to study linguistic processing without normalization are discussed.

Data from an experiment on recognition of tactually presented upper case letters was used to make a confusion matrix like that made by G. C. Gilmore et al (1979) with visually presented letters. The significant product-moment correlation (.88) between the 2 matrices suggests that similar processes are involved in the 2 modalities and that visual models should not rely too heavily on uniquely visual mechanisms. (6 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

The renewed focus of attention on investigating spontaneous speech samples in speech and language research has increased the need for recordings of speech in interactive settings. The DiapixUK task is a new and extended set of picture materials based on the Diapix task by Van Engen et al. (Language and Speech, 53, 510-540, 2010), where two people are recorded while conversing to solve a 'spot the difference' task. The new task materials allow for multiple recordings of the same speaker pairs due to a larger set of picture pairs that have a number of tested features: equal difficulty across all 12 picture pairs, no learning effect of completing more than one picture task and balanced contributions from both speakers. The new materials also provide extra flexibility, making them useful in a wide range of research projects; they are multi-layered electronic images that can be adapted to suit different research needs. This article presents details of the development of the DiapixUK materials, along with data taken from a large corpus of spontaneous speech that are used to demonstrate its new features. Current and potential applications of the task are also discussed.

The present methodological note provides categorization norms for 70 semantic categories collected from 200 participants. The categories were mainly derived from a French translation of the Van Overschelde, Rawson, and Dunlosky (2004) inductor terms including a large set of semantic categories. Our study also extends recent French norms (Léger, Boumlak, {\&} Tijus, 2008; Marchal {\&} Nicolas, 2003) and tests their stability. These 70 cat- egories constitute the widest French categorization norms to date and will be of use to studies in the fields of both linguistics and psycholinguistics. A cross-linguistic comparison, with both quantitative and qualitative results, is also performed, which should prove useful for bilingual and/or cross-linguistic studies. The norms collected for all 70 categories are available for download as supplemental materials from http://brm.psychonomic-journals$\backslash$n.org/content/supplemental.

The English Lexicon Project is a multiuniversity effort to provide a standardized behavioral and descriptive data set for 40,481 words and 40,481 nonwords. It is available via the Internet at elexicon.wustl.edu. Data from 816 participants across six universities were collected in a lexical decision task (approximately 3400 responses per participant), and data from 444 participants were collected in a speeded naming task (approximately 2500 responses per participant). The present paper describes the motivation for this project, the methods used to collect the data, and the search engine that affords access to the behavioral measures and descriptive lexical statistics for these stimuli.

A set of 105 photographs of celebrities has been standardized in French on distinctiveness, proper name agreement, face agreement, age of acquisition (AoA), and subjective frequency. Statistics on the collected variables for photographs are provided. The relationships between these variables have been analyzed. Face naming latencies have also been collected for the photographs of celebrities, and several multiple regression analyses have been carried out on naming latencies and percentages of tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomena. Themain determinants of naming speed included AoA, face agreement, and name agreement. In addition, AoA, together with distinctiveness and face agreement, reliably predicted the percentages of TOTs. The norms, photographs of the celebrities, and spoken naming latencies corresponding to the celebrities are available on the Internet at and should be of great use to researchers interested in the processing of famous people.

Our knowledge about affective processes, especially concerning effects on cognitive demands like word processing, is increasing steadily. Several studies consistently document valence and arousal effects, and although there is some debate on possible interactions and different notions of valence, broad agreement on a two dimensional model of affective space has been achieved. Alternative models like the discrete emotion theory have received little interest in word recognition research so far. Using backward elimination and multiple regression analyses, we show that five discrete emotions (i.e., happiness, disgust, fear, anger and sadness) explain as much variance as two published dimensional models assuming continuous or categorical valence, with the variables happiness, disgust and fear significantly contributing to this account. Moreover, these effects even persist in an experiment with discrete emotion conditions when the stimuli are controlled for emotional valence and arousal levels. We interpret this result as evidence for discrete emotion effects in visual word recognition that cannot be explained by the two dimensional affective space account.

A set of 142 photographs of actions (taken from Fiez {\&} Tranel, 1997) was standardized in French on name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, visual complexity, imageability, age of acquisition, and duration of the depicted actions. Objective word frequency measures were provided for the infinitive modal forms of the verbs and for the cumulative frequency of the verbal forms associated with the photographs. Statistics on the variables collected for action items were provided and compared with the statistics on the same variables collected for object items. The relationships between these variables were analyzed, and certain comparisons between the current database and other similar published databases of pictures of actions are reported. Spoken and written naming latencies were also collected for the photographs of actions, and multiple regression analyses revealed that name agreement, image agreement, and age of acquisition are the major determinants of action naming speed. Finally, certain analyses were performed to compare object and action naming times. The norms and the spoken and written naming latencies corresponding to the pictures are available on the Internet (http://www.psy.univ-bpclermont.fr/{\~{}}pbonin/pbonin-eng.html) and should be of great use to researchers interested in the processing of actions.

We report the results of a large-scale picture naming experiment in which we evaluated the potential contribution of nine theoretically relevant factors to naming latencies. The experiment included a large number of items and a large sample of participants. In order to make this experiment as similar as possible to classic picture naming experiments, participants were familiarized with the materials during a training session. Speeded naming latencies were determined by a software key on the basis of the digital recording of the responses. The effects of various variables on these latencies were assessed with multiple regression techniques, using a repeated measures design. The interpretation of the observed effects is discussed in relation to previous studies and current views on lexical access during speech production.

The present article provides French normative measures for 400 line drawings taken from Cycowicz, Friedman, Rothstein, and Snodgrass (1997), including the 260 line drawings that were normed by Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980). The pictures have been standardized on the following variables: name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, and age of acquisition. These normative data also include word frequency values and the first verbal associate (taken from Ferrand {\&} Alario, 1998). The six variables obtained are important because of their potential effect in many fields of psychology, especially the study of cognitive processes such as visual perception, language, and memory.

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 Ku{\v{e}}ra-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.

This study examined the relationship between language experience and false memory produced by the DRM paradigm. The word lists used in Stadler, et al. (Memory {\&} Cognition, 27, 494-500, 1999) were first translated into Chinese. False recall and false recognition for critical non-presented targets were then tested on a group of Chinese users. The average co-occurrence rate of the list word and the critical word was calculated based on two large Chinese corpuses. List-level analyses revealed that the correlation between the American and Taiwanese participants was significant only in false recognition. More importantly, the co-occurrence rate was significantly correlated with false recall and recognition of Taiwanese participants, and not of American participants. In addition, the backward association strength based on Nelson et al. (The University of South Florida word association, rhyme and word fragment norms, 1999) was significantly correlated with false recall of American participants and not of Taiwanese participants. Results are discussed in terms of the relationship between language experiences and lexical association in creating false memory for word lists.

o collect normative data on familiar spaces and behaviors of college students, two recall tasks were performed. In Experiment 1, 219 undergraduates recalled spaces where they spend time. In Experiment 2,155 undergraduates recalled the kinds of activities they do in familiar spaces. The norms provided here include 40 spaces and 123 different behaviors. Gender differences and transituational behaviors are also reported.

An earlier article reported extensive analyses of confusion data compiled from group averages (Townsend, 1971). The present study provided for essentially the same analyses with different long-term data obtained with two individuals, the primary intent being to examine the ability of recognition and scaling models to explain data at the individual level (which the recognition models purport to describe) and to compare the confusion characteristics of the English uppercase alphabet between the two Ss and between the individual Ss and the group-averaged data. The choice and overlap models were superior to the all-or-none model in predicting the empirical confusion matrices and tended to explain the data structure in a similar manner. Multidimensional scaling analysis again supported a Euclidean metric and suggested four or five underlying stimulus dimensions. However, as before, there were no overriding intuitively appealing psychological dimensions corresponding to these, and possible reasons are discussed. The choice and overlap models appeared to fit as well or better at the individual level than at the group level and the all-or-none model to fit worse. In the present study, probability correct was fit even better by the all-or-none model than in the group study and replicated the result of being better here than the overlap and choice models. Individuals and the group were consistent in their sensory confusions as represented by similarity parameters in the choice and overlap models but differed in their response biases. A simple measure of physical similarity explained 50{\%} of the variance of the similarity structure in the confusion data.

The internal validity of several types of experiments in experimental psychology and neuroscience depends in part on the possibility of controlling or manipulating critical lexical variables such as word frequency of occurrence. Two ways of estimating this variable are (1) objective frequency counts and (2) subjective ratings of word frequency. Each method produces estimates that generally agree (i.e., they are highly correlated) but that disagree substantially concerning the relative frequency of a number of words. To investigate this issue more closely, the global and local agreement of subjective frequency estimates was examined in detail for a pool of 6,202 words drawn from the OMNILEX database of French words (Desrochers, 2006; www.omnilex.uottawa.ca). The results indicated that objective and subjective frequencies are strongly correlated, subjective frequencies share a significant amount of bias variance with other lexical characteristics (e.g., imageability), and the codeterminants of subjective frequency are in an antagonistic relationship with one another. The implications of these results for the selection of lexical stimuli are discussed, and multiple variables to aid in item selection are reported. Supplemental materials for this study may be downloaded from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

Roediger and McDermott (1995) induced false recall and false recognition for words that were not presented in lists. They had subjects study 24 lists of 15 words that were associates of a common word (called the critical target or critical lure) that was not presented in the list. False recall and false recognition of the critical target occurred frequently in response to these lists. The purpose of the current work was to provide a set of normative data for the lists Roediger and McDermott used and for 12 others developed more recently. We tested false recall and false recognition for critical targets from 36 lists. Despite the fact that all lists were constructed to produce false remembering, the diversity in their effectiveness was large--60{\%} or more of subjects falsely recalled window and sleep following the appropriate lists, and false recognition for these items was greater than 80{\%}. However, the list generated from king led to 10{\%} false recall and 27{\%} false recognition. Possible reasons for these wide differences in effectiveness of the lists are discussed. These norms serve as a useful benchmark for designing experiments about false recall and false recognition in this paradigm.

We report work on adding semantic role labels to the Chinese Treebank, a corpus already annotated with phrase structures. The work involves locating all verbs and their nominalizations in the corpus, and semi-automatically adding semantic role labels to their arguments, which are constituents in a parse tree. Although the same procedure is followed, different issues arise in the annotation of verbs and nominalized predicates. For verbs, identifying their arguments is generally straightforward given their syntactic structure in the Chinese Treebank as they tend to occupy well-defined syntactic positions. Our discussion focuses on the syntactic variations in the realization of the arguments as well as our approach to annotating dislocated and discontinuous arguments. In comparison, identifying the arguments for nominalized predicates is more challenging and we discuss criteria and procedures for distinguishing arguments from non-arguments. In particular we focus on the role of support verbs as well as the relevance of event/result distinctions in the annotation of the predicate-argument structure of nominalized predicates. We also present our approach to taking advantage of the syntactic structure in the Chinese Treebank to bootstrap the predicate-argument structure annotation of verbs. Finally, we discuss the creation of a lexical database of frame files and its role in guiding predicate-argument annotation. Procedures for ensuring annotation consistency and inter-annotator agreement evaluation results are also presented.

A Web-based database is developed to provide psycholinguists with a large-scale phonological representation system for all Mandarin Chinese monosyllables. The construction of the system is based on the slot-based phonological pattern generator (PatPho), with an adequate consideration of the language-specific features of the Chinese phonology. Users can retrieve the relevant phonological representations through an interactive query system on the Web. The query outcomes can be saved in a number of formats, such as Excel spreadsheets, for further analyses. This representation system can be used for a variety of purposes--in particular, connectionist language modeling and, more generally, the study of Chinese phonology.

An experiment was conducted to investigate the effect of phonemic or graphemic similarity on recoding of Chinese words. The introduction of acoustic and visual similarity within the list using a retroactive interference design for memory of items showed that both intralist variables were factors causing reduction in recall, with acoustic similarity being more detrimental to short-term retention. An auditory interference task was also shown to have a more severe effect than a visual interference task. Results suggested that dual encoding processes are involved in reading and remembering Chinese.

Information about the affective meanings of words is used by researchers working on emotions and moods, word recognition and memory, and text-based sentiment analysis. Three components of emotions are traditionally distinguished: valence (the pleasantness of a stimulus), arousal (the intensity of emotion provoked by a stimulus), and dominance (the degree of control exerted by a stimulus). Thus far, nearly all research has been based on the ANEW norms collected by Bradley and Lang (1999) for 1,034 words. We extended that database to nearly 14,000 English lemmas, providing researchers with a much richer source of information, including gender, age, and educational differences in emotion norms. As an example of the new possibilities, we included stimuli from nearly all of the category norms (e.g., types of diseases, occupations, and taboo words) collected by Van Overschelde, Rawson, and Dunlosky (Journal of Memory and Language 50:289-335, 2004), making it possible to include affect in studies of semantic memory.

This study was concerned with the impact of stimulus familiarity on young children's ability to recognize spoken words and make explicit judgments about them. In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds made age-of-acquisition (AOA) estimates for a set of words that were very similar to estimates made by older children and adults. In Experiment 2, young children's picture recognition, mispronunciation detection, and vocabulary monitoring performance all varied systematically with these AOA estimates and with a stimulus-type (intact-mispronounced) manipulation. Subjective AOA estimates (whether from children or from adults) proved to be a better predictor of performance than did two objective familiarity measures and subjective imageability. These results point to considerable metalexical knowledge on the part of young children or explicit sensitivity regarding their own vocabulary knowledge. In addition, the results lend some support to the notion that actual AOA contributes to subjective AOA estimates.

The substantial increase of social networks and their combination with mobile devices make rigorous analysis of the outcomes of such system of paramount importance for intelligence gathering and decision making purposes. Since the introduction of Twitter system in 2006, tweeting emerged as an efficient open social network that attracted interest from various research/commercial and military communities. This paper investigates the current software architecture of Twitter system and put forward a new architecture dedicated for semantic and spatial analysis of Twitter data. Especially, Twitter Streaming API was used as a basis for tweet collection data stored in MySQL like database. While Lucene system together with WordNet lexical database linked to advanced natural language processing and PostGIS platform were used to ensure semantic and spatial analysis of the collected data. A functional diversity approach was implemented to enforce fault tolerance for the data collection part where its performances were evaluated through comparison with alternative approaches. The proposal enables the discovery of spatial patterns within geo-located Twitter and can provide the user or operator with useful unforeseen elements. {\textcopyright} 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.