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 .

The temporal characteristics of speech can be captured by examining the distributions of the durations of measurable speech components, namely speech segment durations and pause durations. However, several barriers prevent the easy analysis of pause durations: The first problem is that natural speech is noisy, and although recording contrived speech minimizes this problem, it also discards diagnostic information about cognitive processes inherent in the longer pauses associated with natural speech. The second issue concerns setting the distribution threshold, and consists of the problem of appropriately classifying pause segments as either short pauses reflecting articulation or long pauses reflecting cognitive processing, while minimizing the overall classification error rate. This article describes a fully automated system for determining the locations of speech-pause transitions and estimating the temporal parameters of both speech and pause distributions in natural speech. We use the properties of Gaussian mixture models at several stages of the analysis, in order to identify theoretical components of the data distributions, to classify speech components, to compute durations, and to calculate the relevant statistics.;

Three experiments were conducted to study the effects of enactive imagery (EI) on associative learning. In Experiment I, groups of Ss rated 226 verbs on EI and frequency. In Experiments II and III, Ss learned a 24- and a 16-item list, respectively. The lists consisted of the four possible stimulus-response combinations of high (H) and low (L) EI verb pairs: H-H, H-L, L-H, L-L. In both experiments, EI was found to be a significant factor on the stimulus side, performance being superior when the stimulus was of high EI. In Experiment III, the response EI main effect and the Stimulus by Response EI interaction were also found to be significant. The results indicated that like the imagery evoked by nouns, the EI evoked by verbs facilitates learning.

In this study, we report normative data by native Persian speakers for concept familiarity, age of acquisition (AoA), imageability, image agreement, name agreement, and visual complexity, as well as values for word frequency, word length, and naming latency for 200 of the colored Snodgrass and Vanderwart (Journal of Experimental Psy- chology: Human Learning and Memory 6:174-215, 1980) pictures created by Rossion and Pourtois (Perception 33:217-236, 2004). Using multiple regression analysis, we found independent effects of name agreement, image agree- ment, word frequency, and AoA on picture naming by native Persian speakers from Iran. We concluded that the psycholinguistic properties identified in studies of picture naming in many other languages also predict timed picture naming in Persian. Normativedatafor theratings and picture-naming latencies for the 200 Persian object nouns are provided as an Excel file in the Supplemental materials.

Nonverbal vocal expressions, such as laughter, sobbing, and screams, are an important source of emotional information in social interactions. However, the investigation of how we process these vocal cues entered the research agenda only recently. Here, we introduce a new corpus of nonverbal vocalizations, which we recorded and submitted to perceptual and acoustic validation. It consists of 121 sounds expressing four positive emotions (achievement/triumph, amusement, sensual pleasure, and relief) and four negative ones (anger, disgust, fear, and sadness), produced by two female and two male speakers. For perceptual validation, a forced choice task was used (n = 20), and ratings were collected for the eight emotions, valence, arousal, and authenticity (n = 20). We provide these data, detailed for each vocalization, for use by the research community. High recognition accuracy was found for all emotions (86 {\%}, on average), and the sounds were reliably rated as communicating the intended expressions. The vocalizations were measured for acoustic cues related to temporal aspects, intensity, fundamental frequency (f0), and voice quality. These cues alone provide sufficient information to discriminate between emotion categories, as indicated by statistical classification procedures; they are also predictors of listeners' emotion ratings, as indicated by multiple regression analyses. This set of stimuli seems a valuable addition to currently available expression corpora for research on emotion processing. It is suitable for behavioral and neuroscience research and might as well be used in clinical settings for the assessment of neurological and psychiatric patients. The corpus can be downloaded from Supplementary Materials.

Although many visual stimulus databases exist, none has data on item similarity levels for multiple items of each kind of stimulus. We present such data for 50 sets of grayscale object photographs. Similarity measures between pictures in each set (e.g., 25 different buttons) were collected using a similarity-sorting method (Goldstone, Behavior Research Methods Instruments {\&} Computers, 26(4):381-386, 1994). A validation experiment used data from 1 picture set and compared responses from standard pairwise measures. This showed close agreement. The similarity-sorting measures were then standardized across picture sets, using pairwise ratings. Finally, the standardized similarity distances were validated in a recognition memory experiment; false alarms increased when targets and foils were more similar. These data will facilitate memory and perception research that needs to make comparisons between stimuli with a range of known target-foil similarities.

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

Complete normative data are presented for responses to 56 verbal categories by students from the Universities of Maryland (W=270) and Illinois (JV= 172). All 43 categories from the Connecticut norms are included, and complete data are presented for all responses given by each S to each category label within 30 sec. Additional data include (a) number of times each response was given first and mean rank of each response, (6) correlations between the various measures and between the Maryland and Illinois samples for each category, and (c) "category potency" measures and ratings for each category.

We report psycholinguistic norms for 305 French idiomatic expressions (Study 1). For each of the idiomatic expressions, the following variables are reported: knowledge, predictability, literality, compositionality, subjective and objective frequency, familiarity, age of acquisition (AoA), and length. In addition, we have collected comprehension times for each idiom (Study 2). The psycholinguistic relevance of the collected norms is explained, and different analyses (descriptive statistics, correlation and multiple regression analyses) performed on the norms are reported and discussed. The entire set of norms and reading times are provided as supplemental material.

We report object-naming and object recognition times collected from Russian native speakers for the colorized version of the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 6:174-215, 1980) pictures (Rossion {\&} Pourtois, Perception 33:217-236, 2004). New norms for image variability, body-object interaction [BOI], and subjective frequency collected in Russian, as well as new name agreement scores for the colorized pictures in French, are also reported. In both object-naming and object comprehension times, the name agreement, image agreement, and age-of-acquisition variables made significant independent contributions. Objective word frequency was reliable in object-naming latencies only. The variables of image variability, BOI, and subjective frequency were not significant in either object naming or object comprehension. Finally, imageability was reliable in both tasks. The new norms and object-naming and object recognition times are provided as supplemental materials.

We present a new database of lexical decision times for English words and nonwords, for which two groups of British participants each responded to 14,365 monosyllabic and disyllabic words and the same number of nonwords for a total duration of 16 h (divided over multiple sessions). This database, called the British Lexicon Project (BLP), fills an important gap between the Dutch Lexicon Project (DLP; Keuleers, Diependaele, {\&} Brysbaert, Frontiers in Language Sciences. Psychology, 1, 174, 2010) and the English Lexicon Project (ELP; Balota et al., 2007), because it applies the repeated measures design of the DLP to the English language. The high correlation between the BLP and ELP data indicates that a high percentage of variance in lexical decision data sets is systematic variance, rather than noise, and that the results of megastudies are rather robust with respect to the selection and presentation of the stimuli. Because of its design, the BLP makes the same analyses possible as the DLP, offering researchers with a new interesting data set of word-processing times for mixed effects analyses and mathematical modeling. The BLP data are available at http://crr.ugent.be/blp and as Electronic Supplementary Materials.

Many studies have addressed the issue of whether age of acquisition and/ or frequency affect particular lexical tasks. Methods typically employed in such studies are based on the general linear model (e.g., ANOVA or multiple regression). These methods assume manipulated independent variables whereas the usual approach of investigating age-of-acquisition and frequency effects uses estimated norms of word properties. This failure to truly manipulate variables violate the assumptions of the analyses. A simulation is provided that demonstrates how this violation can lead to erroneous conclusions of effects when none are present. Recommendations are made for a more correlational approach to analysis using structural equation modelling techniques. It is also discussed how this use of estimates of lexical data is problematic for determining effects throughout psycholinguistic research. {\textcopyright} 2006 Psychology Press Ltd.

Studies of lexical processing have relied heavily on adult ratings of word learning age or age of acquisition, which have been shown to be strongly predictive of processing speed. This study reports a set of objective norms derived in a large-scale study of British children's naming of 297 pictured objects (including 232 from the Snodgrass {\&} Vanderwart, 1980, set). In addition, data were obtained on measures of rated age of acquisition, rated frequency, imageability, object familiarity, picture-name agreement, and name agreement. We discuss the relationship between the objective measure and adult ratings of word learning age. Objective measures should be used when available, but where not, our data suggest that adult ratings provide a reliable and valid measure of real word learning age.

In Exp I, 328 adjectives were presented to 324 undergraduates for rating of imagery (I), ease of definition (ED), and animateness (A). The normative value of these indices was tabulated for each adjective. A correlational analysis of these measures and Ku{\v{c}}era-Francis frequency (KF) is also presented. To demonstrate the usefulness of these rating scales, Exp II requested 90 undergraduates to free recall a list of 50 adjectives after they completed an incidental learning task of rating these adjectives for I, ED, or A. Ss recalled more high I than low I adjectives and more difficult- than easy-to-define adjectives regardless of which incidental rating task they performed. Neither the degree of animateness nor the KF value of the adjectives influenced the percentage of recall.

Focuses on the statistical relationship established between high frequency, small variety and shortness in length of words. Analysis of written language; Influence of age differences with the relationship between variety and frequency of occurrence of words; Growth of available vocabulary.

A list of gender-related and gender-neutral words for use in testing gender stereotyping and memory was created and evaluated. Words were rated by samples of undergraduates at universities located in the northeast, southeast, and south-central United States. A substantial list of masculine, feminine, and gender-neutral words was identified. These lists allow researchers to construct large lists of gender-associated words while being able to control for extraneous variables, such as word frequency and word length. In addition, the high reliability across the samples suggests that gender ratings are a fairly stable phenomenon. Applications for this list are discussed. The word lists presented in Tables 1-3 and the raw data analyzed in this article may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

This paper presents an analysis of the distribution of phonological similarity relations among monosyllabic spoken words in English. It differs from classical analyses of phonological neighborhood density (e.g., Luce {\&} Pisoni, 1998) by assuming that not all phonological neighbors are equal. Rather, it is assumed that the phonological lexicon has psycholinguistic structure. Accordingly, in addition to considering the number of phonological neighbors for any given word, it becomes important to consider the nature of these neighbors. If one type of neighbor is more dominant, neighborhood density effects may reflect levels of segmental representation other than the phoneme, particularly prior to literacy. Statistical analyses of the nature of phonological neighborhoods in terms of rime neighbors (e.g., hat/cat), consonant neighbors (e.g., hat/hit), and lead neighbors (e.g., hat/ham) were thus performed for all monosyllabic words in the Celex corpus (4,086 words). Our results show that most phonological neighbors are rime neighbors (e.g., hat/cat) in English. Similar patterns were found when a corpus of words for which age-of-acquisition ratings were available was analyzed. The resultant database can be used as a tool for controlling and selecting stimuli when the role of lexical neighborhoods in phonological development and speech processing is examined.

The Nelson and Narens (Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 19:338-368, 1980) general knowledge norms have been valuable to researchers in many fields. However, much has changed over the 32 years since the 1980 norms. For example, in 1980, most people knew the answer to the question "What is the name of the Lone Ranger's Indian sidekick?" (answer: Tonto), whereas in 2012, few people know this answer. Thus, we updated the 1980 norms and expanded them by providing new measures. In particular, we report two new metacognitive measures (confidence judgments and peer judgments) and provide a detailed report of commission errors. Each of these measures will be valuable to researchers, and together they are likely to facilitate future research in a number of fields, such as research investigating memory illusions, metamemory processes, and error correction. The presence of substantial generational shifts from 1980 to 2012 necessitates the use of updated norms.

Age of acquisition (AoA) ratings made on a 1–7 scale for 3,000 monosyllabic words were obtained from 32 participants across four blocks of 750 trials (two blocks of 750 trials were completed in each of 2 days). These results, as well as those of the regression analyses and reliability and validity measures that were originally reported in Cortese and Khanna (2007), are summarized here. Here, we also report high interblock correlations across items, indicating that participants were consistent in their ratings across blocks. The norms for the 3,000 words are important for researchers interested in word processing and may be downloaded from the Psycho- nomic Society's Norms, Stimuli, and Data archive at www.psychonomic.org/archive.

The use of rhyme in learning/memory and cognitive studies is extensive. However, there are very few normative studies for words that rhyme. The current study rectified this problem by collecting rhyme norms for 477 words from 545 subjects. Groups of subjects were given 40 words in serial order and requested, for each word, to generate as many rhymes as possible within a 30-sec interval. The data include several rhyme measures as well as measures of other word attributes that were taken from other sources. In addition, the rhyme responses to the target words were given along with their Thomdike and Lorge (1944) and Ku{\v{c}}era and Francis (1967) normative frequencies. Finally, the data were used to investigate various relationships including the spew hypothesis and the accessibility of rhyme sets.

In this article, we introduce ESCOLEX, the first European Portuguese children's lexical database with grade-level-adjusted word frequency statistics. Computed from a 3.2-million-word corpus, ESCOLEX provides 48,381 word forms extracted from 171 elementary and middle school textbooks for 6- to 11-year-old children attending the first six grades in the Portuguese educational system. Like other children's grade-level databases (e.g., Carroll, Davies, {\&} Richman, 1971; Corral, Ferrero, {\&} Goikoetxea, Behavior Research Methods, 41, 1009–1017, 2009; L{\'{e}}t{\'{e}}, Sprenger-Charolles, {\&} Col{\'{e}}, Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, {\&} Computers, 36, 156–166, 2004; Zeno, Ivens, Millard, Duvvuri, 1995), ESCOLEX provides four frequency indices for each grade: overall word frequency (F), index of dispersion across the selected textbooks (D), estimated frequency per million words (U), and standard frequency index (SFI). It also provides a new measure, contextual diversity (CD). In addition, the number of letters in the word and its part(s) of speech, number of syllables, syllable structure, and adult frequencies taken from P-PAL (a European Portuguese corpus-based lexical database; Soares, Comesa{\~{n}}a, Iriarte, Almeida, Sim{\~{o}}es, Costa, {\ldots}, Machado, 2010; Soares, Iriarte, Almeida, Sim{\~{o}}es, Costa, Fran{\c{c}}a, {\ldots}, Comesa{\~{n}}a, in press) are provided. ESCOLEX will be a useful tool both for researchers interested in language processing and development and for professionals in need of verbal materials adjusted to children's developmental stages. ESCOLEX can be downloaded along with this article or from http://​p-pal.​di.​uminho.​pt/​about/​databases.

In this study, we present the normative values of the adaptation of the International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS-2; Bradley {\&} Lang, 2007a) for European Portuguese (EP). The IADS-2 is a standardized database of 167 naturally occurring sounds that is widely used in the study of emotions. The sounds were rated by 300 college students who were native speakers of EP, in the three affective dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance, by using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM). The aims of this adaptation were threefold: (1) to provide researchers with standardized and normatively rated affective sounds to be used with an EP population; (2) to investigate sex and cultural differences in the ratings of affective dimensions of auditory stimuli between EP and the American (Bradley {\&} Lang, 2007a) and Spanish (Fern{\'{a}}ndez-Abascal et al., Psicothema 20:104-113 2008; Redondo, Fraga, Padr{\'{o}}n, {\&} Pi{\~{n}}eiro, Behavior Research Methods 40:784-790 2008) standardizations; and (3) to promote research on auditory affective processing in Portugal. Our results indicated that the IADS-2 is a valid and useful database of digitized sounds for the study of emotions in a Portuguese context, allowing for comparisons of its results with those of other international studies that have used the same database for stimulus selection. The normative values of the EP adaptation of the IADS-2 database can be downloaded along with the online version of this article.

In this article we present a standardized set of 260 pictures for use in experiments investigating differences and similarities in the processing of pictures and words. The pictures are black-and-white line drawings executed according to a set of rules that provide consistency of pictorial representation. The pictures have been standardized on four variables of central relevance to memory and cognitive processing: name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. The intercorrelations among the four measures were low, suggesting that they are indices of different attributes of the pictures. The concepts were selected to provide exemplars from several widely studied semantic categories. Sources of naming variance, and mean familiarity and complexity of the exemplars, differed significantly across the set of categories investigated. The potential significance of each of the normative variables to a number of semantic and episodic memory tasks is discussed.

Ratings are presented for 650 stimuli from word-association lists on each of five scales: good—bad, pleasant—unpleasant, emotional—neutral, concrete—abstract, and easy to associate to—difficult to associate to. The ratings are shown to be highly reliable, and to agree well with previously collected norms of a similar character. The intercorrelations of the five scales with one another and with word frequency are reported.

A count of the relative incidence of letters in 431 pleasant (P) words and 702 unpleasant (U) words revealed that some letters tend to occur more frequently in the initial position of P words and other letters more frequently in the initial position of U words. A task requiring Ss to guess for each letter whether it occurred in a P word or in a U word showed that people are able to approximate these objective probabilities of initial-letter occurrence. These findings can explain how it is possible to identify the probable affective meaning of a word seen in a tachistoscope prior to its complete recognition. Faster recognition of P words in tachistoscopic experiments was accounted for in terms of response probability. {\textcopyright} 1969 Academic Press Inc. All rights reserved.

Perceptual cues mediating recognition of isolated lowercase letters have been investigated in two conditions of marginal reading:from a long distance and in eccentric vision. A high incidence of confusions indicates that observers readily use available cues for arriving at letter responses. Analysis of the confusions leads to perceptual similarities and to common properties that have possibly served as perceptual cues. Dominating similarities are /h k b/, /tilfr/,/eoc/,/aszxe/,/vw/and/gq/. Properties with high cue values are: 1. (1) vertically ascending and descending parts, 2. (2) slenderness, 3. (3) outer vertical and outer oblique parts, and also outer gaps. Inner parts are weak cues at best. Bias effects occur towards letters that occur frequently in the printed language, but they are restricted to confusions. Perceptual cues prevail over bias effects. In eccentric vision, recognition is limited by more factors than just a low visual acuity. {\textcopyright} 1971.

INFORMATION regarding the sequential dependencies among letters in the English language is of interest not only in connexion with linguistics and cryptography, but also because of its value for communication theory and for the psychology of language1,2. ? 1960 Nature Publishing Group.

Throughout the last decades, numerous picture data sets have been developed, such as the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) set, and have been normalized for variables such as name and familiarity; however, due to cultural and linguistic differences, norms can vary from one country to another. The effect due specifically to culture has already been demonstrated by comparing samples from different countries where the same language is spoken. On the other hand, it is still not clear how differences between languages may affect norms. The present study explores this issue by collecting and comparing norms on names and many other features from French Canadian speakers and English Canadian speakers living in Montreal, who thus live in similar cultural environments. Norms were collected for the photos of objects from the Bank of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS) by asking participants to name the objects, to categorize them, and to rate their familiarity, visual complexity, object agreement, viewpoint agreement, and manipulability. Names and ratings from the French speakers are available in Appendix A, available in the supplemental materials. The results show that most of the norms are comparable across linguistic groups and also that the ratings given are correlated across linguistic groups. The only significant group differences were found in viewpoint agreement and visual complexity. Overall, there was good concordance between the norms collected from French and English native speakers living in the same cultural setting.

Ratings of the association values on a five-point scale by 95 Ss are reported for the 101 numbers between 0 and 100. The results reveal sizable and relatively consistent differences between numbers which are shown to be related to learning difficulty, as well as a high degree of individual variability. {\textcopyright} 1962.

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.

Compared sentence completion responses across 130 adults, aged 18-56 yrs old, for 198 highly constrained sentence contexts designed to elicit the best completion in the vast majority of Subjects. For each context, completions and their respective frequency of occurrence are provided. Subjects of all ages produced highly similar terminal words. Results indicate that greater SES and higher levels of education were mildly associated with a greater probability of producing a best completion response. Although increasing age correlated with greater probability of producing a best completion, this very weak association would not preclude use of these stimuli with a wide age range. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2000 APA, all rights reserved)

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

The general aim of this study is to validate the cognitive relevance of the geometric model used in the semantic atlases (SA). With this goal in mind, we compare the results obtained by the automatic contexonym organizing model (ACOM)--an SA-derived model for word sense representation based on contextual links--with human subjects' responses on a word association task. We begin by positioning the geometric paradigm with respect to the hierarchical paradigm (WordNet) and the vector paradigm (latent semantic analysis [LSA] and the hyperspace analogue to language model). Then we compare ACOM's responses with Hirsh and Tree's (2001) word association norms based on the responses of two groups of subjects. The results showed that words associated by 50{\%} or more of the Hirsh and Tree subjects were also proposed by ACOM (e.g., 71{\%} of the words in the norms were also given by ACOM). Finally, we compare ACOM and LSA on the basis of the same association norms. The results indicate better performance for the geometric model.

WordNet, an electronic dictionary (or lexical database), is a valuable resource for computational and cognitive scientists. Recent work on the computing of semantic distances among nodes (synsets) in WordNet has made it possible to build a large database of semantic distances for use in selecting word pairs for psychological research. The database now contains nearly 50,000 pairs of words that have values for semantic distance, associative strength, and similarity based on co-occurrence. Semantic distance was found to correlate weakly with these other measures but to correlate more strongly with another measure of semantic relatedness, featural similarity. Hierarchical clustering analysis suggested that the knowledge structure underlying semantic distance is similar in gross form to that underlying featural similarity. In experiments in which semantic similarity ratings were used, human participants were able to discriminate semantic distance. Thus, semantic distance as derived from WordNet appears distinct from other measures of word pair relatedness and is psychologically functional. This database may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

Six previous studies of the variables affecting anagram solution are re-examined for the evidence that number of syllables contributes to solution difficulty. It was shown that the number of syllables in a solution word was confounded with imagery for one study and with diagram frequency for another. More importantly it was shown that the number of syllables has a large effect on anagram solution difficulty in the re-analysis of the results from the other four studies. In these studies, the number of syllables was either more important than the principal variable examined in the experiment or the second most important variable. Overall the effect size for the number of syllables was large, d = 1.14. The results are discussed in the light of other research and it is suggested that anagram solution may have more in common with other word identification and reading processes than has been previously thought.

Cognitive psychology is finding increasing use for the word fragment completion test, in which words have to be completed from a subset of their letters (e.g., horizon from --r-z--). Researchers often try to restrict their fragments to those that can be completed with only one word, but this is difficult to do and probably never has been achieved. To help resolve this problem, a list is provided of 1,086 three- to eight-letter words, each of which is uniquely specified by a two-letter fragment, where uniqueness is defined on the basis of two sizable word collections.

The processes involved in past tense verb generation have been central to models of inflectional morphology. However, the empirical support for such models has often been based on studies of accuracy in past tense verb formation on a relatively small set of items. We present the first large-scale study of past tense inflection (the Past Tense Inflection Project, or PTIP) that affords response time, accuracy, and error analyses in the generation of the past tense form from the present tense form for over 2,000 verbs. In addition to standard lexical variables (such as word frequency, length, and orthographic and phonological neighborhood), we have also developed new measures of past tense neighborhood consistency and verb imageability for these stimuli, and via regression analyses we demonstrate the utility of these new measures in predicting past tense verb generation. The PTIP can be used to further evaluate existing models, to provide well controlled stimuli for new studies, and to uncover novel theoretical principles in past tense morphology.

In prior experiments S-generated associative devices or natural language mediators (NLMs) linking pairs of items have been shown to facilitate acquisition of paired associates. Since Ss are questioned about NLMs after learning, such repos/rts may be a result of the questioning. To obtain an a priori estimate of NLM probability, several hundred pairs, each composed of CVCs of about equal association value (AV), were shown for 15 sec. while student Ss wrote down any NLM they could generate which linked both the stumulus and response. The AV level was varied between pairs. The proportion of Ss able to generate an NLM is the associability value (AS). As expected, AS and AV are correlated although AS varies considerably among pairs composed of items about equal in AV. Experiments run after the AS scale was obtained demonstrated that AS is valuable as a predictor of learning rate. AS values were highly correlated with the frequency of NLMs in postexperiment reports. It is concluded that the AS measure represents a valuable addition to our understanding of the complexity of verbal learning.

We report normative data collected from Mainland Chinese speakers for 232 objects taken from Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980). These data include adult ratings of concept familiarity, age of acquisition (AoA), printedword frequency, and word length (in syllables), as well as measures of rated visual complexity, image agreement, and name agreement. We then examined timed picture naming of these objects with native Chinese speakers in Beijing in two experiments using line drawings and colored pictures. In both experiments, the variables name agreement, rated concept familiarity, and AoA made significant independent contributions to naming latency in multiple regression analyses. We observed a correlation ofr=.85 between naming latency with line drawings and colored pictures and a reduced effect of image agreement on naming when colored pictures were presented. We discuss the implications of our findings for the study of lexical processing in Chinese. Normative data for 232 Chinese nouns may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive

Phonotactic probability refers to the frequency with which phonological segments and sequences of phonological segments occur in words in a given language. We describe one method of estimating phonotactic probabilities based on words in American English. These estimates of phonotactic probability have been used in a number of previous studies and are now being made available to other researchers via a Web-based interface. Instructions for using the interface, as well as details regarding how the measures were derived, are provided in the present article. The Phonotactic Probability Calculator can be accessed at http://www.people.ku.edu/{\~{}}mvitevit/PhonoProbHome.html.