The present study provides norms for Spanish word lists that have been used to create false memories in native speakers of Spanish. The word lists reported are based on the Roediger and McDermott (1995) lists that have been used extensively to examine illusory memories. We employed Roediger and McDermott's critical lures, translated them into Spanish, and created semantically associated Spanish word lists by testing native Spanish speakers. The resulting lists were then normed with additional native Spanish speakers. Overall, the participants recalled 53{\%} of the list items and 32{\%} of the critical lures with the word lists developed. In addition, 74{\%} of the list items and 69{\%} of the critical lures were recognized by the participants. The present study adds to the literature by providing a set of Spanish lists that can be used by researchers interested in evaluating false memories in individuals who speak Spanish. These norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

The SUBTLEX-US corpus has been parsed with the CLAWS tagger, so that researchers have information about the possible word classes (parts-of-speech, or PoSs) of the entries. Five new columns have been added to the SUBTLEX-US word frequency list: the dominant (most frequent) PoS for the entry, the frequency of the dominant PoS, the frequency of the dominant PoS relative to the entry's total frequency, all PoSs observed for the entry, and the respective frequencies of these PoSs. Because the current definition of lemma frequency does not seem to provide word recognition researchers with useful information (as illustrated by a comparison of the lemma frequencies and the word form frequencies from the Corpus of Contemporary American English), we have not provided a column with this variable. Instead, we hope that the full list of PoS frequencies will help researchers to collectively determine which combination of frequencies is the most informative.

Word frequency is the most important variable in research on word processing and memory. Yet, the main criterion for selecting word frequency norms has been the availability of the measure, rather than its quality. As a result, much research is still based on the old Kucera and Francis frequency norms. By using the lexical decision times of recently published megastudies, we show how bad this measure is and what must be done to improve it. In particular, we investigated the size of the corpus, the language register on which the corpus is based, and the definition of the frequency measure. We observed that corpus size is of practical importance for small sizes (depending on the frequency of the word), but not for sizes above 16-30 million words. As for the language register, we found that frequencies based on television and film subtitles are better than frequencies based on written sources, certainly for the monosyllabic and bisyllabic words used in psycholinguistic research. Finally, we found that lemma frequencies are not superior to word form frequencies in English and that a measure of contextual diversity is better than a measure based on raw frequency of occurrence. Part of the superiority of the latter is due to the words that are frequently used as names. Assembling a new frequency norm on the basis of these considerations turned out to predict word processing times much better than did the existing norms (including Kucera {\&} Francis and Celex). The new SUBTL frequency norms from the SUBTLEX(US) corpus are freely available for research purposes from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental, as well as from the University of Ghent and Lexique Web sites.

Three decades after their publication, Bloom and Fischler's (1980) sentence completion norms continue to demonstrate widespread utility. The aim of the present study was to extend this contribution by expanding the existing database of high-constraint, high cloze probability sentences. Using the criteria established by Bloom and Fischler, we constructed 398 new sentences and presented these along with 100 sentences from their original list to be normed using a sample of 400 participants. Of the 498 sentences presented, 400 met criteria for high cloze probability-that is, .67 or higher probability of being completed by a specific single word. Of these, 321 sentences were from the new set and an additional 79 were from Bloom and Fischler's set. A high degree of correspondence was observed between responses obtained by Bloom and Fischler for their high-constraint set. A second experiment utilized an N400 event-related potential paradigm to provide further validation of the contextual constraint for the newly generated set. As expected, N400 amplitude was greater for sentences that violated contextual expectancy by ending in a word other than the newly established completion norm. Sentence completion norms are frequently used in cognitive research, and this larger database of high cloze probability sentences is expected to be of benefit to the research community for many years to come. The full set of stimuli and sentence completion norms from this study may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

This article describes a Windows program that enables users to obtain a broad range of statistics concerning the properties of word and nonword stimuli, including measures of word frequency, orthographic similarity, orthographic and phonological structure, age of acquisition, and imageability. It is designed for use by researchers in psycholinguistics, particularly those concerned with recognition of isolated words. The program computes measures of orthographic similarity on line, either with respect to a default vocabulary of 30,605 words or to a vocabulary specified by the user. In addition to providing standard orthographic neighborhood measures, the program can be used to obtain information about other forms of orthographic similarity, such as transposed-letter similarity and embedded-word similarity. It is available, free of charge, from the following Web site: http://www.maccs.mq. edu.au/colin/N-Watch/.

Four hundred stimulus behaviors and their mean normative ratings for kindness, intelligence, goodness, and normality were presented for use in person perception and memory studies. Each of the four normative ratings was based on a separate sample of 35 to 39 undergraduate students from the University of Illinois. Rankings of the mean ratings were provided to facilitate a quick comparison of the behavior ratings along each of the four trait dimensions. In addition, a cluster analysis of the behaviors was reported, using the mean kindness, intelligence, and normality ratings as defining variables. Six clusters were distinguished: (1) behaviors that primarily conveyed kindness; (2) behaviors that primarily conveyed unkindness; (3) behaviors that conveyed an unusual amount of intelligence; (4) behaviors that conveyed general intelligence; (5) behaviors that conveyed a general lack of intelligence; and (6) behaviors that conveyed very little information about kindness or intelligence.

Multimodal corpora that show humans interacting via language are now relatively easy to collect. Current tools allow one either to apply sets of time-stamped codes to the data and consider their timing and sequencing or to describe some specific linguistic structure that is present in the data, built over the top of some form of transcription. To further our understanding of human communication, the research community needs code sets with both timings and structure, designed flexibly to address the research questions at hand. The NITE XML Toolkit offers library support that software developers can call upon when writing tools for such code sets and, thus, enables richer analyses than have previously been possible. It includes data handling, a query language containing both structural and temporal constructs, components that can be used to build graphical interfaces, sample programs that demonstrate how to use the libraries, a tool for running queries, and an experimental engine that builds interfaces on the basis of declarative specifications.

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/materia/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.

12 Ss in each of grades K, 2, 4, and 6 rated the likability of 22 common trait adjectives. The mean ratings and standard deviations are given for each trait. Analysis of variance indicated that only 2 of the 22 traits showed significant differences across grade levels. The data indicated that the evaluative meaning for this set of traits was remarkably stable and that the conventional meaning of common trait words is achieved at an early age

The main objective of this study is to investigate the abstract-concrete dichotomy by introducing a new variable: the mode of acquisition (MoA) of a concept. MoA refers to the way in which concepts are acquired: through experience, through language, or through both. We asked 250 participants to rate 417 words on seven dimensions: age of acquisition, concreteness, familiarity, context availability, imageability, abstractness, and MoA. The data were analyzed by considering MoA ratings and their relationship with the other psycholinguistic variables. Distributions for concreteness, abstractness, and MoA ratings indicate that they are qualitatively different. A partial correlation analysis revealed that MoA is an independent predictor of concreteness or abstractness, and a hierarchical multiple regression analysis confirmed MoA as being a valid predictor of abstractness. Strong correlations with measures for the English translation equivalents in the MRC database confirmed the reliability of our norms. The full database of MoA ratings and other psycholinguistic variables may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental or www.abstract-project.eu.

We provide objective data concerning the age of acquisition (AoA) of words from 202 Italian children 34-69 months of age. We investigated picture naming with 80 concrete words belonging to eight semantic categories that are included in a widely used battery for the study of naming and semantic memory. For each word, we calculated three different indices: two directly expressing the age at which a picture was given the correct name by at least 75{\%} of the subjects, and one expressing the overall percentage of our children who were correct in the task. (For the latter index, we provide separate values for boys and girls.). The correlation between objective indices of AoA and adult estimates culled from the literature was not very high. Moreover, objective indices showed low correlations with frequency and familiarity, in contrast to adult ratings. We conclude that adult estimates of AoA present validity problems and should be used with caution. The full set of stimuli is available at www.psychonomic.org/archive.

The appropriate selection of both pictorial and linguistic experimental stimuli requires a previous language-specific standardization process of the materials across different variables. Considering that such normative data have not yet been collected for Modern Greek, in this study normative data for the color version of the Snodgrass and Vanderwart picture set (Rossion {\&} Pourtois, 2004) were collected from 330 native Greek adults. Participants named the pictures (providing name agreement ratings) and rated them for visual complexity and age of acquisition. The obtained measures represent a useful tool for further research on Greek language processing and constitute the first picture normative study for this language. The picture norms from this study and previous ones may be downloaded from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

This study describes the collection of a large set of word association norms. In a continuous word association task, norms for 1,424 Dutch words were gathered. For each cue, three association responses were obtained per participant. In total, an average of 268 responses were collected for each cue. We investigated the relationship with similar procedures, such as discrete association tasks and exemplar generation tasks. The results show that the use of a continuous task allows the study of weaker associations in comparison with a discrete task. The effects of the continuous tasks were investigated for set size and the availability characteristics of the responses, measured through word frequency, age of acquisition, and imageability. Finally, we compared our findings to those of a semantically constrained version of the association task in which participants generated responses within the domain of a semantic category. Results of this comparison are discussed. The Appendix cited in this article is available at www.psychonomic.org/archive.

The present study provides a set of objective age of acquisition (AoA) norms for 223 Italian words that may be useful for conducting cross-linguistic studies or experiments on Italian language processing. The data were collected by presenting children from the ages of 2 to 11 with a normed picture set (Lotto, Dell'Acqua, {\&} Job, 2001). Following the study of Morrison, Chappell, and Ellis (1997), we report two measures of objective AoA. Both measures strongly correlated with each other, and they also showed a good correlation with the rated AoA provided by adult participants. Furthermore, we assessed the relationship between the AoA measures and other variables used in psycholinguistic experiments. Regression analyses showed that familiarity, typicality, and word frequency were significant predictors of AoA. AoA, but not word frequency, was found to determine naming latencies. Finally, we present a path model in which AoA is a mediator in predicting speed in picture naming. The norms and the picture set can also be downloaded from http://dpss.psy.unipd.it/files/strumenti.php and from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

Features are at the core of many empirical and modeling endeavors in the study of semantic concepts. This article is concerned with the delineation of features that are important in natural language concepts and the use of these features in the study of semantic concept representation. The results of a feature generation task in which the exemplars and labels of 15 semantic categories served as cues are described. The importance of the generated features was assessed by tallying the frequency with which they were generated and by obtaining judgments of their relevance. The generated attributes also featured in extensive exemplar by feature applicability matrices covering the 15 different categories, as well as two large semantic domains (that of animals and artifacts). For all exemplars of the 15 semantic categories, typicality ratings, goodness ratings, goodness rank order, generation frequency, exemplar associative strength, category associative strength, estimated age of acquisition, word frequency, familiarity ratings, imageability ratings, and pairwise similarity ratings are described as well. By making these data easily available to other researchers in the field, we hope to provide ample opportunities for continued investigations into the nature of semantic concept representation. These data may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society's Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, www.psychonomic.org/archive.

A new Real-Time Subjective Emotionality Assessment (RTSEA) system was developed for this study. The system is composed of two parts: an emotionality input and evaluation parts. An experiment was conducted in order to investigate the effectiveness of the RTSEA system. The present study compared Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) with the RTSEA by presenting 28 subjects with pictures that aroused either positive or negative emotion. Following the experiment, a subjective assessment using a questionnaire was given to the same subjects. According to the correlation coefficients, changes of the RTSEA had strong correlations with the changes of the GSR. Also, the questionnaire results showed marked similarity to the average responses of the RTSEA. In conclusion, the most remarkable characteristic of the present system is that it not only assesses the average emotionality when stimuli are presented, but also shows the trend of change in emotionality over time.

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 ({\textgreater} or =.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 {\textgreater} or = .85) and for imageability (r {\textgreater} or = .69). Subjective frequency was positively and significantly correlated with objective frequency estimates drawn from 10 different sources (r {\textgreater} or = .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.

Recent studies suggest that performance attendant on visual word perception is affected not only bythe "traditional" feedforward inconsistency (spelling ---7phonology) but also by its feedback incon- sistency (phonology ---7spelling). The present study presents a statistical analysis of the bidirectional inconsistency for all French monosyllabic words. Weshow that French is relatively consistent from spelling to phonology but highlyinconsistent from phonology to spelling. Appendixes Band Clist prior and conditional probabilities for all inconsistent mappings and thus provide a valuable tool for con- trolling, selecting, and constructing stimulus materials for psycholinguistic and neuropsychological research. Such large-scale statistical analyses about a language's structure are crucial for develop- ing metrics of inconsistency, generating hypotheses for cross-linguistic research, and building com- putational models of reading. When

Familiarity with a word can be divided into two main components: familiarity with the form of the word (due to both its lexicality and its specific form) and familiarity with its meaning. In this study, ratings of familiarity were compared for words whose meaning was unknown to participants (UM words), for words of known meaning (KM words), and for unknown words (U words). Linguistic and experiential frequencies were equivalent. Rated familiarity was lower for UM than KM words and even lower for U words. Next, we built pseudowords from these stimuli by changing one letter and submitted them to two familiarity rating tasks that differed in the nature of the additional stimuli: either only nonwords or nonwords plus words. It was assumed that familiarity ratings would be lower for pseudowords built from UM words than for pseudowords built from KM words. The data were consistent with this assumption, and ratings depended on the initial categories of stimuli. These results support the view that usual word familiarity has two components, familiarity with form and familiarity with meaning, and a double source, processing of word form and processing of word meaning. The full set of these materials and norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Picture naming has become an important experimental paradigm in cognitive psychology. Young children are more variable than adults in their naming responses and less likely to know the object or its name. A consequence is that the interpretation of the two classical measures used by Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) for scoring name agreement in adults (the percentage of agreement, based on modal name, and the H statistic, based on alternative names) will differ because of the high rate of "don't know object" responses, common in young children, relative to the low rate of "don't know object" responses more characteristic of adults. The present study focused on this methodological issue in young French children (3-8 years old), using a set of 145 Snodgrass-Vanderwart pictures. Our results indicate that the percentage of agreement based on the expected name is a better measure of picture-naming performance than are the commonly used measures. The norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

In picture-naming tasks, participants name a picture as quickly as possible. In several studies, when the participant did not provide the picture name in the first seconds after object presentation, the examiner provided phonemic or semantic cues. Under these conditions, word retrieval should be easier, thus lowering the age of acquisition (AoA). The goal of the present study was to collect objective norms of AoA in French without any kind of cue. The results were then compared with other European databases that relied on picture-naming tasks conducted with phonemic or semantic cues. Globally, the data of all the databases are significantly correlated. However, the AoA measures in these databases are always lower than in our study, except in Alvarez and Cuetos (2007), who did not provide any assistance to the participant. Therefore, giving phonemic and/or semantic cues lowers the AoA values, indicating that the values from different databases in this domain should be taken with caution. The objective AoA norms from this study may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society's Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Ratings were obtained from 100 subjects on a seven-point scale of the degree of synonymity of 279 pairs of nouns, half the subjects rating the pairs presented in one order and half in the other. Alternative synonyms were also invited. Mean ratings ranged from 6.76 to 3.34. Forty-six pairs were identical with those presented in a similar American study by Whitten et al. (1979). While the British ratings showed some differences from the American ones, the two sets of ratings were significantly correlated over these pairs. As in the American study, order of presentation significantly affected rated similarity in some pairs, though the American and British studies were not highly consistent in this respect. No distinguishing characteristic of such pairs was apparent.

Semantic norms for properties produced by native speakers are valuable tools for researchers interested in the structure of semantic memory and in category-specific semantic deficits in individuals following brain damage. The aims of this study were threefold. First, we sought to extend existing semantic norms by adopting an empirical approach to category (Exp. 1) and concept (Exp. 2) selection, in order to obtain a more representative set of semantic memory features. Second, we extensively outlined a new set of semantic production norms collected from Italian native speakers for 120 artifactual and natural basic-level concepts, using numerous measures and statistics following a feature-listing task (Exp. 3b). Finally, we aimed to create a new publicly accessible database, since only a few existing databases are publicly available online.

The priming technique was used to investigate the conditions under which a homograph's dominant and/or nondominant semantic sense will be retrieved. Subjects verified whether “A(n) A is a(n) B” when A was an ambiguous word and B was a word corresponding to either a dominant or an unusual semantic sense of word A. When word B most often corresponded to the dominant sense of word A (Experiment I), a Priming by Dominance interaction was obtained in the reaction time (RT) data; viz, the facilitatory effect of priming was greater for the dominant-sense sentences than for the unusual-sense sentences. When the word B equally often corresponded to the dominant and unusual senses of A (Experiment 2), the facilitatory effect of priming was equal for the dominant-sense and unusual-sense sentences. These results were interpreted within the framework of a two-stage model of lexical access (d. Posner {\&} Snyder, 1975; Neely, 1977). An application of this two-stage model to the now rather extensive literature on homographic processing helps clear up the apparent contradictions that have been prevalent in this literature.

GROUPS OF SS, 17-46 YR. OLD COLLEGE STUDENTS, WERE USED TO SCALE 925 NOUNS ON ABSTRACTNESS-CONCRETENESS (C), IMAGERY (I), AND MEANINGFULNESS (M). CONCRETENESS WAS DEFINED IN TERMS OF DIRECTNESS OF REFERENCE TO SENSE EXPERIENCE, AND I, IN TERMS OF WORD'S CAPACITY TO AROUSE NONVERBAL IMAGES; C AND I WERE RATED ON 7-POINT SCALES. MEANINGFULNESS WAS DEFINED IN TERMS OF THE MEAN NUMBER OF WRITTEN ASSOCIATIONS IN 30 SEC. THE MEAN SCALE VALUES FOR THESE VARIABLES ARE PRESENTED FOR EACH OF THE 925 NOUNS. ALSO REPORTED ARE THE INTERCORRELATIONS OF THE VARIABLES, TOGETHER WITH AN EXAMINATION OF THE WORDS FOR WHICH C, I, AND M VALUES ARE MOST CLEARLY DIFFERENTIATED; AND RELIABILITY DATA, INCLUDING COMPARISONS WITH SCALE VALUES FOR THE VARIABLES FROM OTHER STUDIES. (45 REF.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Sentiment analysis of microblogs such as Twitter has recently gained a fair amount of attention. One of the simplest sentiment analysis approaches compares the words of a posting against a labeled word list, where each word has been scored for valence, -- a 'sentiment lexicon' or 'affective word lists'. There exist several affective word lists, e.g., ANEW (Affective Norms for English Words) developed before the advent of microblogging and sentiment analysis. I wanted to examine how well ANEW and other word lists performs for the detection of sentiment strength in microblog posts in comparison with a new word list specifically constructed for microblogs. I used manually labeled postings from Twitter scored for sentiment. Using a simple word matching I show that the new word list may perform better than ANEW, though not as good as the more elaborate approach found in SentiStrength.

Normative data were collected on 300 general-information questions from a wide variety of topics, including history, sports, art, geography, literature, and entertainment. Male and female undergraduates at two different universities made a one-word response to each question either in a response booklet or at a computer console. The reported data include the following for each question: (a) probability of recall for all 270 undergraduates, for males versus females, and for University of Washington subjects versus University of California, Irvine, subjects, (b) latency of correct recall, (c) latency of errors, and (d) feeling-of-knowing ratings for nonrecalled items. Correlations among these dependent variables, along with measures of reliability, are also reported. {\textcopyright} 1980 Academic Press, Inc.

The aim of this article is to describe a database of diphone positional frequencies in French. More specifically, we provide frequencies for word-initial, word-internal, and word-final diphones of all words extracted from a subtitle corpus of 50 million words that come from movie and TV series dialogue. We also provide intra- and intersyllable diphone frequencies, as well as interword diphone frequencies. To our knowledge, no other such tool is available to psycholinguists for the study of French sequential probabilities. This database and its new indicators should help researchers conducting new studies on speech segmentation.

A new stimulus set of 60 male-face stimuli in seven in-depth orientations was developed. The set can be used in research on configural versus featural mechanisms of face processing. Configural, or holistic, changes are produced by changing the global form of the face, whereas featural, or part-based, changes are attained by altering the local form of internal facial features. For each face in the set, there is one other face that differs only by its global form and one other face that differs only by its internal features. In all faces, extrafacial cues have been eliminated or standardized. The stimulus set also contains a color-coded division of each face in areas of interest, which is useful for eye movement research on face scanning strategies. We report a matching experiment with upright and inverted face pairs that demonstrates that the face stimulus set is indeed useful for research on configural and featural face perception. The stimulus set may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society's archive (brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental) or from our Web site (http://ppw.kuleuven.be/labexppsy/newSite/resources).

In most experiments that involve between-subjects or between-items factorial designs, the items and/or the participants in the various experimental groups differ on one or more variables, but need to be matched on all other factors that can affect the outcome measure. Matching large groups of items or participants on multiple dimensions is a difficult and time-consuming task, yet failure to match conditions will lead to suboptimal experiments. We describe a computer program, "Match", that automates this process by selecting the best-matching items from larger sets of candidate items. In most cases, the program produces near-optimal solutions in amatter of minutes and selects matches that are typically superior to those obtained using hand matching or other semiautomated processes. We report the results of a case study in which Match was used to generate matched sets of experimental items (words varying in length and frequency) for a published study on language processing. The program was able to come up with better-matching item sets than those hand-selected by the authors of the original study, and in a fraction of the time originally taken up with stimulus matching.

Semantic features have provided insight into numerous behavioral phenomena concerning concepts, categorization, and semantic memory in adults, children, and neuropsychological populations. Numerous theories and models in these areas are based on representations and computations involving semantic features. Consequently, empirically derived semantic feature production norms have played, and continue to play, a highly useful role in these domains. This article describes a set of feature norms collected from approximately 725 participants for 541 living (dog) and nonliving (chair) basic-level concepts, the largest such set of norms developed to date. This article describes the norms and numerous statistics associated with them. Our aim is to make these norms available to facilitate other research, while obviating the need to repeat the labor-intensive methods involved in collecting and analyzing such norms. The full set of norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Anagram tasks are frequently used in cognitive research, and the generation of new scrambled letter combinations is a task well suited to a software solution. Most available programs, however, do not allow experimenters to generate new anagrams flexibly or to characterize existing anagrams using psycholinguistic criteria. They also do not provide detailed information on their source dictionaries. We present anagram software that interfaces with CELEX2, an internationallyrecognized psycholinguistic database. This software allows users to capitalize on lexical variables and thus enables direct control of psycholinguistic features that may influence the cognitive processes involved in anagram solution.

Reported a systematic investigation of the most popular synonym for each of 279 nouns in a test with 50 Ss drawn from a variety of college departments. A further 50 Ss performed the same task for the synonyms used in a previous rating task devised by the present authors (see PA; Vol 67:3240) for each of the 279 nouns. The preferred synonym, number of Ss giving it, and the number giving the previously used synonym are provided. The ratings from the previous task were correlated with the number of Ss giving the previously used synonym. Though the correlations were significant, they accounted for less than 15{\%} of the variance. The present data should be of value in a number of tasks investigating perception, memory, and judgment in relation to meaning, enabling control of both accessibility of a synonym and rated similarity.

The iconicity of a Chinese character, or the degree to which it looks like the concept that it represents, has been suggested as affecting the learning and processing of the character. However, previous studies have not provided good empirical information on the iconicity of specific characters. To fill this gap, 40 U.S. adults with no knowledge of Chinese were given an English word or short phrase together with two Chinese characters and were asked which character matched the meaning of the English word. The right and wrong answers had the same number of strokes, and different wrong answers were used for different participants. We examined all 213 simple-structure Chinese characters that occur in textbooks for elementary school children. The overall percentage of correct responses was 53.6{\%}, slightly but significantly higher than would be expected by chance. Using a false discovery rate procedure, we found that 15 of the 213 characters were guessed at a level higher than chance. The proportion of correct responses to each character, which can be taken as an indicator of its degree of iconicity, should be useful to researchers studying Chinese character reading and writing. The full database, showing the proportion of correct guesses and other psycholinguistic variables for each character, can be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental .

The study presented here provides researchers with a revised list of affective German words, the Berlin Affective Word List Reloaded (BAWL-R). This work is an extension of the previously published BAWL (V{\~{o}}, Jacobs, {\&} Conrad, 2006), which has enabled researchers to investigate affective word processing with highly controlled stimulus material. The lack of arousal ratings, however, necessitated a revised version of the BAWL. We therefore present the BAWL-R, which is the first list that not only contains a large set of psycholinguistic indexes known to influence word processing, but also features ratings regarding emotional arousal, in addition to emotional valence and imageability. The BAWL-R is intended to help researchers create stimulus material for a wide range of experiments dealing with the affective processing of German verbal material.

We introduce the Berlin Affective Word List (BAWL) in order to provide researchers with a German database containing both emotional valence and imageability ratings for more than 2,200 German words. The BAWL was cross-validated using a forced choice valence decision task in which two distinct valence categories (negative or positive) had to be assigned to a highly controlled selection of 360 words according to varying emotional content (negative, neutral, or positive). The reaction time (RT) results corroborated the valence categories: Words that had been rated as "neutral" in the norms yielded maximum RTs. The BAWL is intended to help researchers create stimulus materials for a wide range of experiments dealing with the emotional processing of words.

Principles of lexical semantics developed in the course of building an on-line lexical database are discussed. The approach is relational rather than componential. The fundamental semantic relation is synonymy, which is required in order to define the lexicalized concepts that words can be used to express. Other semantic relations between these concepts are then described. No single set of semantic relations or organizational structure is adequate for the entire lexicon: nouns, adjectives, and verbs each have their own semantic relations and their own organization determined by the role they must play in the construction of linguistic messages. {\textcopyright} 1991.

A confusion matrix of the whole block capital letters of the alphabet was obtained to examine the nature of tactile letter recognition. A 17 x 17 matrix of tactile stimulators was placed against the backs of 4 blind Ss. A hierarchical cluster analysis {\&} a nonmetric multidimensional scaling technique were applied to the matrix. Results of the two analyses were consistent with each other, {\&} indicated that at least three independent basic letter features - enclosing shapes, vertical parallel lines, {\&} angle of lines - play important parts in tactile letter recognition. Most confusion may be attributable to displacement of the apparent loci, omission or fusion of loci of stimulation, {\&} failure to detect gaps in the tactile letters. 1 Table, 6 Figures. HA

The QWERTY keyboard mediates communication for millions of language users. Here, we investigated whether differences in the way words are typed correspond to differences in their meanings. Some words are spelled with more letters on the right side of the keyboard and others with more letters on the left. In three experiments, we tested whether asymmetries in the way people interact with keys on the right and left of the keyboard influence their evaluations of the emotional valence of the words. We found the predicted relationship between emotional valence and QWERTY key position across three languages (English, Spanish, and Dutch). Words with more right-side letters were rated as more positive in valence, on average, than words with more left-side letters: the QWERTY effect. This effect was strongest in new words coined after QWERTY was invented and was also found in pseudowords. Although these data are correlational, the discovery of a similar pattern across languages, which was strongest in neologisms, suggests that the QWERTY keyboard is shaping the meanings of words as people filter language through their fingers. Widespread typing introduces a new mechanism by which semantic changes in language can arise.

This study addresses the need in discourse psychology for computational techniques that analyze text on multiple levels of cohesion and text difficulty. Discourse psychologists often investigate phenomena related to discourse processing using lengthy texts containing multiple paragraphs, as opposed to single word and sentence stimuli. Characterizing such texts in terms of cohesion and coherence is challenging. Some computational tools are available, but they are either fragmented over different databases or they assess single, specific features of text. Coh-Metrix is a computational linguistic tool that measures text cohesion and text difficulty on a range of word, sentence, paragraph, and discourse dimensions. This study investigated the validity of Coh-Metrix as a measure of cohesion in text using stimuli from published discourse psychology studies as a benchmark. Results showed that Coh-Metrix indexes of cohesion (individually and combined) significantly distinguished the high- versus low-cohesion versions of these texts. The results also showed that commonly used readability indexes (e.g., Flesch-Kincaid) inappropriately distinguished between low- and high-cohesion texts. These results provide a validation of Coh-Metrix, thereby paving the way for its use by researchers in cognitive science, discourse processes, and education, as well as for textbook writers, professionals in instructional design, and instructors. 2010 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

Feature-based descriptions of concepts produced by subjects in a property generation task are widely used in cognitive science to develop empirically grounded concept representations and to study systematic trends in such representations. This article introduces BLIND, a collection of parallel semantic norms collected from a group of congenitally blind Italian subjects and comparable sighted subjects. The BLIND norms comprise descriptions of 50 nouns and 20 verbs. All the materials have been semantically annotated and translated into English, to make them easily accessible to the scientific community. The article also presents a preliminary analysis of the BLIND data that highlights both the large degree of overlap between the groups and interesting differences. The complete BLIND norms are freely available and can be downloaded from http://sesia.humnet.unipi.it/blind{\_}data .

(1) The first objective is to relate the semantic differential to other associative techniques. The semantic diFerential may be viewed as a restricted association-test of potentially high sensitivity. In essence, the subject (S) is given a concept and asked whether it is more ... $\backslash$n

An increasing number of studies are investigating the cognitive processes underlying human-object interactions. For instance, several researchers have manipulated the type of grip associated with objects in order to study the role of the objects' motor affordances in cognition. The objective of the present study was to develop norms for the types of grip employed when grasping and using objects, with a set of 296 photographs of objects. On the basis of these ratings, we computed measures of agreement to evaluate the extent to which participants agreed about the grip used to interact with these objects. We also collected ratings on the dissimilarity between the grips employed for grasping and for using objects, as well as the number of actions that can typically be performed with the objects. Our results showed grip agreements of 67 {\%} for grasping and of 65 {\%} for using objects. Moreover, our pattern of correlations is highly consistent with the idea that the grips for grasping and using objects represent two different motor dimensions of the objects.

Event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded in two experiments to examine the effects of concreteness and emotionality on visual word processing. Concrete and abstract words of negative, neutral or positive valence, as well as pseudowords were presented in a hemifield lexical decision task. Experiment 1 yielded early (P2) and late (N400, late positive component/LPC) emotional word effects. Concreteness affected the N400 and the LPC. In line with the extended dual coding model and with previous studies, the N400 effect represents greater semantic activation, whereas the LPC effect may result from mental imagery being activated by concrete words. Experiment 2 engaged participants in a go/no-go task pressing a button for pseudowords. Here, emotionality and concreteness modulated the N400 independently, but interacted in the LPC time window. Only concrete emotional words differed in the LPC response suggesting that concrete negative words such as "wound" or "bomb" differ from neutral and positive words as a function of mental imagery. {\textcopyright} 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Writing Pal is an intelligent tutoring system that provides writing strategy training. A large part of its artificial intelligence resides in the natural language processing algorithms to assess essay quality and guide feedback to students. Because writing is often highly nuanced and subjective, the development of these algorithms must consider a broad array of linguistic, rhetorical, and contextual features. This study assesses the potential for computational indices to predict human ratings of essay quality. Past studies have demonstrated that linguistic indices related to lexical diversity, word frequency, and syntactic complexity are significant predictors of human judgments of essay quality but that indices of cohesion are not. The present study extends prior work by including a larger data sample and an expanded set of indices to assess new lexical, syntactic, cohesion, rhetorical, and reading ease indices. Three models were assessed. The model reported by McNamara, Crossley, and McCarthy (Written Communication 27:57-86, 2010) including three indices of lexical diversity, word frequency, and syntactic complexity accounted for only 6{\%} of the variance in the larger data set. A regression model including the full set of indices examined in prior studies of writing predicted 38{\%} of the variance in human scores of essay quality with 91{\%} adjacent accuracy (i.e., within 1 point). A regression model that also included new indices related to rhetoric and cohesion predicted 44{\%} of the variance with 94{\%} adjacent accuracy. The new indices increased accuracy but, more importantly, afford the means to provide more meaningful feedback in the context of a writing tutoring system.

Sensory experience rating (SER), a new variable motivated by the grounded cognition framework of conceptual processing (e.g., Barsalou, 2008 ), indexes the degree to which a word evokes sensory/perceptual experiences. In the present study, SERs were collected for over 2,850 words. While SER is correlated with imageability, age of acquisition, and word frequency, the latter variables (along with seven others) account for less than 30{\%} of the variance in SER. Reanalyses of two large-scale studies demonstrate that SER significantly predicts lexical decision times when other established predictor variables are statistically controlled. These results suggest that conceptual processing is grounded in sensory systems. Additionally, a major benefit of this variable is that it allows psycholinguistic researchers to examine semantic-perceptual links for all word classes with a single rating.

Abstract 1. Presented 200 transitive verbs in Exp I to 141 British undergraduates for ratings of concreteness , ease-of-definition, observability, and acceptability of being combined with an abstract subject or object. The normative value of these indices is tabulated for each ...

The index of productive syntax (IPSyn; Scarborough (Applied Psycholinguistics 11:1-22, 1990) is a measure of syntactic development in child language that has been used in research and clinical settings to investigate the grammatical development of various groups of children. However, IPSyn is mostly calculated manually, which is an extremely laborious process. In this article, we describe the AC-IPSyn system, which automatically calculates the IPSyn score for child language transcripts using natural language processing techniques. Our results show that the AC-IPSyn system performs at levels comparable to scores computed manually. The AC-IPSyn system can be downloaded from www.hlt.utdallas.edu/{\~{}}nisa/ipsyn.html .