Independent groups of subjects generated restricted free associations that either rhymed with the cue or were members of the semantic category designated by the cue. The data include both a listing of the responses to each cue and a cross-index of all words appearing as responses to more than one cue. These data will permit researchers to take into account the a priori associative strength between cues and targets at these two levels of processing.

The Palermo and Jenkins (1964) word association norms were recodified, with responses alphabetically arranged, and related to the various levels of stimuli.

The rating of English words and their Welsh equivalents provided the opportunity to compare subjective ratings in two languages as well as the opportunity to compare ratings in a deep and a shallow orthography (English and Welsh, respectively). Four variables—age of acquisition (AOA), familiarity, concreteness, and imageability—were rated. AOA and imageability emerged as the two most important extralingual variables (r=.8 and .73, respectively). Although the patterns of ratings were generally consistent within and between languages, some differences did emerge when these patterns were compared with those from other studies. Using similar instructions to rate familiarity and AOA resulted in a low correlation in English (r=2.5) and a high correlation in Welsh (r=2.84). The mean ratings for familiarity, concreteness, and imageability were higher in Welsh than in English (5.23 vs. 3.35, 5.46 vs. 4.41, and 5.29 vs. 4.38, respectively). Both of these findings are explained in terms of differences in orthographic depth, and it is suggested that Welsh may be a more imageable language than English.

Twenty-four judges estimated the conceptual difficulty level of 870 five-letter words, using a 5-point scale. The words were selected from three word-frequency categories (1, 5–10, and 50–3,562/million) based on the word counts provided by Ku{\v{c}}era and Francis (1967). The ratings were reliable. Tables in this paper list the means and standard deviations of the ratings for each word. Reaction time (RT) for valid word identification was tested in 20 subjects, using four sets of 50 words designed to test the effects of word frequency and word difficulty. RT was longer for more difficult words when word frequency was held constant. A word-frequency effect on RT was present when difficulty was held constant. The relationship of the results to subjective estimates of word familiarity is discussed.

Past research has demonstrated cross-linguistic, cross-modal, and task-dependent differences in neighborhood density effects, indicating a need to control for neighborhood variables when developing and interpreting research on language processing. The goals of the present paper are two-fold: (1) to introduce CLEARPOND (Cross-Linguistic Easy-Access Resource for Phonological and Orthographic Neighborhood Densities), a centralized database of phonological and orthographic neighborhood information, both within and between languages, for five commonly-studied languages: Dutch, English, French, German, and Spanish; and (2) to show how CLEARPOND can be used to compare general properties of phonological and orthographic neighborhoods across languages. CLEARPOND allows researchers to input a word or list of words and obtain phonological and orthographic neighbors, neighborhood densities, mean neighborhood frequencies, word lengths by number of phonemes and graphemes, and spoken-word frequencies. Neighbors can be defined by substitution, deletion, and/or addition, and the database can be queried separately along each metric or summed across all three. Neighborhood values can be obtained both within and across languages, and outputs can optionally be restricted to neighbors of higher frequency. To enable researchers to more quickly and easily develop stimuli, CLEARPOND can also be searched by features, generating lists of words that meet precise criteria, such as a specific range of neighborhood sizes, lexical frequencies, and/or word lengths. CLEARPOND is freely-available to researchers and the public as a searchable, online database and for download at http://clearpond.northwestern.edu.

The most frequent names in Spanish corresponding to a set of 247 pictures in the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) norms were used as stimuli in a discrete free-association task. A sample of 525 Spanish-speaking participants provided the first word that came to mind for each of the verbal stimuli. Responses were organized according to frequency of production in order to prepare word-association norms for the set of stimuli.

Knowledge of specific characteristics of verbal material is imperative in cognitive research, and this need calls for periodical updating of normative data. With this aim, and considering that the most recent Spanish-language category norms for adults date back to more than 30 years ago, and that they do not include some very common categories, a new normative study was conducted. In this study, production data for exemplars in the 56 categories of Battig and Montague (Journal of Experimental Psychology, 80, 1-46, 1969) were collected from a pool of 284 young adults who were native speakers of Spanish using an exemplar production task. With the goal of providing a useful tool for cognitive research to be conducted with Spanish-speaking samples, indices of frequency, rank, and lexical availability for the exemplars of each category are provided in a computerized database. The norms described are available for downloading as supplemental material with this article.

An idiom is classically defined as a formulaic sequence whose meaning is comprised of more than the sum of its parts. For this reason, idioms pose a unique problem for models of sentence processing, as researchers must take into account how idioms vary and along what dimensions, as these factors can modulate the ease with which an idiomatic interpretation can be activated. In order to help ensure external validity and comparability across studies, idiom research benefits from the availability of publicly available resources reporting ratings from a large number of native speakers. Resources such as the one outlined in the current paper facilitate opportunities for consensus across studies on idiom processing and help to further our goals as a research community. To this end, descriptive norms were obtained for 870 American English idioms from 2,100 participants along five dimensions: familiarity, meaningfulness, literal plausibility, global decomposability, and predictability. Idiom familiarity and meaningfulness strongly correlated with one another, whereas familiarity and meaningfulness were positively correlated with both global decomposability and predictability. Correlations with previous norming studies are also discussed.

Age of acquisition (AoA) is an important variable in word recognition research. Up to now, nearly all psychology researchers examining the AoA effect have used ratings obtained from adult participants. An alternative basis for determining AoA is directly testing children's knowledge of word meanings at various ages. In educational research, scholars and teachers have tried to establish the grade at which particular words should be taught by examining the ages at which children know various word meanings. Such a list is available from Dale and O'Rourke's (1981) Living Word Vocabulary for nearly 44 thousand meanings coming from over 31 thousand unique word forms and multiword expressions. The present article relates these test-based AoA estimates to lexical decision times as well as to AoA adult ratings, and reports strong correlations between all of the measures. Therefore, test-based estimates of AoA can be used as an alternative measure.

Psycholinguistic research has been advanced by the development of word recognition megastudies. For instance, the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007) provides researchers with access to naming and lexical-decision latencies for over 40,000 words. In the present work, we extended the megastudy approach to a task that emphasizes semantic processing. Using a concrete/abstract semantic decision (i.e., does the word refer to something concrete or abstract?), we collected decision latencies and accuracy rates for 10,000 English words. The stimuli were concrete and abstract words selected from Brysbaert, Warriner, and Kuperman's (2013) comprehensive list of concreteness ratings. In total, 321 participants provided responses to 1,000 words each. Whereas semantic effects tend to be quite modest in naming and lexical decision studies, analyses of the concrete/abstract semantic decision responses show that a substantial proportion of variance can be explained by semantic variables. The item-level and trial-level data will be useful for other researchers interested in the semantic processing of concrete and abstract words

This article presents subjective rating norms for a new set of 600 symbols, depicting various contents (e.g., transportation, technology, and leisure activities) that can be used by researchers in different fields. Symbols were evaluated for aesthetic appeal, familiarity, visual complexity, concreteness, valence, arousal, and meaningfulness. The normative data were obtained from 388 participants, and no gender differences were found. Descriptive results (means, standard deviations, and confidence intervals) for each symbol in each dimension are presented. Overall, the dimensions were highly correlated. Additionally, participants were asked to briefly describe the meaning of each symbol. The results indicate that the present symbol set is varied, allowing for the selection of exemplars with different levels on the seven examined dimensions. This set of symbols constitutes a tool with potential for research in different areas. The database with all of the symbols is available as supplemental materials.

This contribution aims to establish a set of validated vocal Italian pseudowords that convey three emotional tones (angry, happy, and neutral) for prosodic emotional processing research. We elaborated the materials by following a series of specific steps. First, we tested the valence of a set of written pseudowords generated by specific software. Two Italian actors (male and female) then recorded the resulting subset of linguistically legal and neutral pseudowords in three emotional tones. Finally, on the basis of the results of independent ratings of emotional intensity, we selected a set of 30 audio stimuli expressed in each of the three different emotions. Acoustic analyses indicated that the prosodic indexes of fundamental frequency, vocal intensity, and speech rate anchored individual perceptions of the emotions expressed. Finally, the acoustic profile of the set of emotional stimuli confirmed previous findings. The happy tone stimuli showed high f0 values, high intensity, high pitch variability, and a faster speech rate. The angry tone stimuli were also characterized by high f0 and intensity, but by relatively smaller pitch variability and a lower speech rate. This last profile echoes the description of "cold anger." This new set of prosodic emotion stimuli will constitute a useful resource for future research that requires emotional prosody materials. It could be used both for Italian and for cross-language studies.

No catalog of words currently available contains normative data for large numbers of words rated low or high in affect. A preliminary sample of 1,545 words was rated for pleasantness by 26–33 college students. Of these words, 274 were selected on the basis of their high or low ratings. These words, along with 125 others (Rubin, 1981), were then rated by additional groups of 62–76 college students on 5-point rating scales for the dimensions of pleasantness, imagery, and familiarity. The resulting mean ratings were highly correlated with the ratings obtained by other investigators using some of the same words. However, systematic differences in the ratings were found for male versus female raters. Females tended to use more extreme ratings than did males when rating words on the pleasantness scale. Also, females tended to rate words higher on the imagery and familiarity scales. Whether these sex differences in ratings represent cognitive differences between the sexes or merely differences in response style is a question that can be determined only by further research.

Pictures are often used as stimuli in studies of perception, language, and memory. Since performances on different sets of pictures are generally contrasted, stimulus selection requires the use of standardized material to match pictures across different variables. Unfortunately, the number of standardized pictures available for empirical research is rather limited. The aim of the present study is to provide French normative data for a new set of 299 black-and-white drawings. Alario and Ferrand (1999) were closely followed in that the pictures were standardized on six variables: name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, and age of acquisition. Objective frequency measures are also provided for the most common names associated with the pictures. Comparative analyses between our results and the norms obtained in other, similar studies are reported. Finally, naming latencies corresponding to the set of pictures were also collected from French native speakers, and correlational/multiple-regression analyses were performed on naming latencies. This new set of standardized pictures is available on the Internet (http://leadserv.u-bourgogne.fr/bases/pictures/) and should be of great use to researchers when they select pictorial stimuli.

To obtain data for the further evaluation of age-of-acquisition as a word attribute in studies of verbal behavior, learning, and memory, estimates were secured from 62 undergraduates (35 males, 27 females) of the age at which they believed they had learned each of 220 picturable nouns (divided into two lists assigned randomly to halves of the sample), according to a 9-point scale. Reliabilities of these ratings were about .98. For comparative purposes, word frequency values for the words were secured from three large word-count studies or, where necessary, from subjective estimates made by 20 adults. Use of these and other variables as predictors of previously obtained picture-naming latencies (Carroll {\&} White, 1973) yielded results supporting the previous finding that age-of-acquisition is a more relevant predictor than word frequency. Some word frequency indices tend to reflect age-of-acquisition, but when this influence is minimized word frequency makes little contribution to the prediction.

There is a lack of indices of rated association for English words, in contrast to a large pool of rated nonsense syllables. To fill this need, 446 English words were randomly selected from Webster's New International Dictionary to represent all English monosyllables, bisyllables, and trisyllables. They were rated for associations on a 7-point scale by 126 Ss. From the ratings three indices of association were obtained. All indices have uncorrected reliabilities in the range 0.95–0.98.

Several studies on auditory word recognition indicate that word processing is influenced by phonological similarity with other words. We describe a lexical database, VoColex, which provides several statistical indexes of phonological similarity between French words. Phonological similarity is computed according to two distinct principles. According to the first principle, phonologically similar words share initial phonemes with the target word. According to the second principle, phonological neighbours correspond to any words which can be derived from the target by a single phoneme change (substitution, addition, or deletion) whatever the position of the modified phoneme. The statistical data provided by VoCoLex allow the control and the empirical manipulation of various measures of phonological similarity, as well as quantitative descriptions of the auditory lexicon.

When researchers are interested in the influence of long-term knowledge on performance, printed word frequency is typically the variable of choice. Despite this preference, we know little about what frequency norms measure. They ostensibly index how often and how recently words are experienced, but words appear in context, so frequency potentially reflects an influence of connections with other words. This paper presents the results of a large free association study as well as the results of experiments designed to evaluate the hypothesis that common words have stronger connections to other words. The norms indicate that common words tend to be more concrete but they do not appear to have more associates, stronger associates, or more connections among their associates. Two extralist cued recall experiments showed that, with other attributes being equal, high- and low-frequency words were equally effective as test cues. These results suggest that frequency does not achieve its effects because of stronger or greater numbers of connections to other words, as implied in SAM. Other results indicated that common words have more connections from other words, including their associates, and that free association provides a valid index of associative strength.

This study presents the adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW; Bradley {\&} Lang, 1999a) for European Portuguese (EP). The EP adaptation of the ANEW was based on the affective ratings made by 958 college students who were EP native speakers. Subjects assessed about 60 words by considering the affective dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance, using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) in either a paper-and-pencil or a Web survey procedure. Results of the adaptation of the ANEW for EP are presented. Furthermore, the differences between EP, American (Bradley {\&} Lang, 1999a), and Spanish (Redondo, Fraga, Padr{\'{o}}n, {\&} Comesa{\~{n}}a, Behavior Research Methods, 39, 600-605, 2007) standardizations were explored. Results showed that the ANEW words were understood in a similar way by EP, American, and Spanish subjects, although some sex and cross-cultural differences were observed. The EP adaptation of the ANEW is shown to be a valid and useful tool that will allow researchers to control and/or manipulate the affective properties of stimuli, as well as to develop cross-linguistic studies. The normative values of EP adaptation of the ANEW can be downloaded at http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental .

32 undergraduates learned a list of 8 paired-associates in which 4 pairs were composed of short-latency associative RT CVCVC response terms and 4 pairs of long-latency RT terms. 2 of the 4 response terms of each group were low in meaningfulness and 2 were high. The list was learned under either a 3- or 6-sec presentation rate. Consistent with predictions and with findings of previous studies using CVC response terms, the short-latency RT terms were learned faster than the long-latency terms and the effect of RT was most pronounced at the 3-sec presentation rate. Fewer trials were required to learn the high- than the low-meaningfulness terms, and fewer trials were required for learning at the 6-sec presentation rate than at the 3-sec rate. For a sample of 65 CVCVCs, intercorrelations among RT, associative frequency, pronunciability, and association value were found to be high. Correlations between log frequency value and the other variables were low.

Analyzed 204 literary metaphors selected from works of poetry and 264 nonliterary metaphors generated by the present authors' 10 dimensions representing ratings of comprehensibility, perceived metaphoric qualities, imagery values, familiarity, and tenor-vehicle relatedness. Analyses of the normative data indicated that (a) the mean ratings of the metaphors were reliable; (b) 634 undergraduate raters varied in their reactions to the metaphors; (c) the 10 dimensions correlated substantially with one another; and (d) literary and nonliterary metaphors showed similar patterns for the descriptive and relational statistics examined. Data indicate the need for metaphor researchers to consider multiple attributes if they are to achieve less confounded or factorial variation of theoretically motivated variables.

Research in metaphor processing has made extensive use of the normed metaphor database created by Katz, Paivio, Marschark, {\&} Clark (Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 3, 191–214, 1988). Because of the plasticity of figurative language, we conducted a renorming of selected metaphors from the database on a new student population. Correlations between Katz et al.'s and the present data showed that the pattern of responses has remained highly consistent across time and populations. The consistency of the normative ratings allows us to be confident in future research that will use the Katz et al. collection.

ASL-LEX is a lexical database that catalogues information about nearly 1,000 signs in American Sign Language (ASL). It includes the following information: subjective frequency ratings from 25–31 deaf signers, iconicity ratings from 21–37 hearing non-signers, videoclip duration, sign length (onset and offset), grammatical class, and whether the sign is initialized, a fingerspelled loan sign, or a compound. Information about English translations is available for a subset of signs (e.g., alternate translations, translation consistency). In addition, phonological properties (sign type, selected fingers, flexion, major and minor location, and movement) were coded and used to generate sub-lexical frequency and neighborhood density estimates. ASL-LEX is intended for use by researchers, educators, and students who are interested in the properties of the ASL lexicon. An interactive website where the database can be browsed and downloaded is available at http://asl-lex.org.

Word association data were obtained from two cohorts of British adults. Young adults (aged 21–30 yrs) and older adults (aged 66–81 yrs) responded to 90 words in a discrete word association task. An associative frequency measure was calculated by counting how many participants produced a particular word and then converting this number into a proportion. The degree of overlap between the cohorts in terms of dominant responses, the responses with the highest association frequencies, was moderate. Dominant responses were common to the two cohorts for only 36 of the 90 items. When the top three responses were considered the degree of overlap increased to approximately 60{\%}. Four measures of response heterogeneity were calculated for each stimulus item. Comparison of the responses of the younger and older adults indicates that there was less response heterogeneity amongst the older cohort. These norms should be of use to investigators interested in developmental changes in the structure of semantic memory across the adult lifespan as well as to researchers interested in comparing results from neurologically impaired older adults to a normative sample from the same age cohort.

For more than half a century, emotion researchers have attempted to establish the dimensional space that most economically accounts for similarities and differences in emotional experience. Today, many researchers focus exclusively on two-dimensional models involving valence and arousal. Adopting a theoretically based approach, we show for three languages that four dimensions are needed to satisfactorily represent similarities and differences in the meaning of emotion words. In order of importance, these dimensions are evaluation-pleasantness, potency-control, activation-arousal, and unpredictability. They were identified on the basis of the applicability of 144 features representing the six components of emotions: (a) appraisals of events, (b) psychophysiological changes, (c) motor expressions, (d) action tendencies, (e) subjective experiences, and (f) emotion regulation.

A sample of 45 student subjects provided solution scores for 80 five-letter anagrams. These scores were analysed as a function of solution word imagery, con-creteness, familiarity, objective frequency, age-of-acquisition and associative meaningfulness using multiple regression techniques. Two bigram measures together with number of vowels, nature of starting letter (vowel or consonant), anagram pronounceability and anagram-solution similarity scores were also entered into the regression equations. The bigram measures, the starting letter and anagram-solution similarity emerged as having significant associations with the solution scores. Previous reports of imagery effects in anagram are discussed in the light of the present results.

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

The present study introduces the first Spanish database with normative ratings of semantic similarity for 185 word triplets. Each word triplet is constituted by a target word (e.g., guisante [pea]) and two semantically related and nonassociatively related words: a word highly related in meaning to the target (e.g., jud{\'{i}}a [bean]), and a word less related in meaning to the target (e.g., patata [potato]). The degree of meaning similarity was assessed by 332 participants by using a semantic similarity rating task on a 9-point scale. Pairs having a value of semantic similarity ranging from 5 to 9 were classified as being more semantically related, whereas those with values ranging from 2 to 4.99 were considered as being less semantically related. The relative distance between the two pairs for the same target ranged from 0.48 to 5.07 points. Mean comparisons revealed that participants rated the more similar words as being significantly more similar in meaning to the target word than were the less similar words. In addition to the semantic similarity norms, values of concreteness and familiarity of each word in a triplet are provided. The present database can be a very useful tool for scientists interested in designing experiments to examine the role of semantics in language processing. Since the variable of semantic similarity includes a wide range of values, it can be used as either a continuous or a dichotomous variable. The full database is available in the supplementary materials.

We collected norms on the gender stereotypicality of an extensive list of role nouns in Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Slovak, to be used as a basis for the selection of stimulus materials in future studies. We present a Web-based tool (available at https://www.unifr.ch/lcg/ ) that we developed to collect these norms and that we expect to be useful for other researchers, as well. In essence, we provide (a) gender stereotypicality norms across a number of languages and (b) a tool to facilitate cross-language as well as cross-cultural comparisons when researchers are interested in the investigation of the impact of stereotypicality on the processing of role nouns.

The present study provides Dutch norms for age of acquisition, familiarity, imageability, image agreement, visual complexity, word frequency, and word length (in syllables) for 124 line drawings of actions. Ratings were obtained from 117 Dutch participants. Word frequency was determined on the basis of the SUBTLEX-NL corpus (Keuleers, Brysbaert, {\&} New, Behavior Research Methods, 42, 643-650, 2010). For 104 of the pictures, naming latencies and name agreement were determined in a separate naming experiment with 74 native speakers of Dutch. The Dutch norms closely corresponded to the norms for British English. Multiple regression analysis showed that age of acquisition, imageability, image agreement, visual complexity, and name agreement were significant predictors of naming latencies, whereas word frequency and word length were not. Combined with the results of a principal-component analysis, these findings suggest that variables influencing the processes of conceptual preparation and lexical selection affect latencies more strongly than do variables influencing word-form encoding.

The present study provides affective norms for a large corpus of French words (N = 1,031) that were rated on emotional valence and emotional arousal by 469 French young adults. Ratings were made using the Self-Assessment Manikin (Lang, 1980). By combining evaluations of valence and arousal, and including ratings provided by male and female young adults, this database complements and extends existing French-language databases. The response reliability for the two affective dimensions was good, and the consistency between the present and previous ratings was high. We found a strong quadratic relationship between the valence and arousal ratings. Perceptions of the affective content of a word were partly linked to sex. This new affective database (FAN) will enable French-speaking researchers to select suitable materials for studies of how the character of affective words influences their cognitive processing. FAN is available as an online supplement downloadable with this article.

A corpus of 5,765 consonant-vowel-consonant sequences (CVCs) was compiled, and phonotactic probability and neighborhood density were computed for both child and adult corpora. This corpus of CVCs, provided as supplementary materials, was analyzed to address the following questions: (1) Do computations based on a child corpus differ from those based on an adult corpus? (2) Do the phonotactic probability and/or the neighborhood density of real words differ from those of nonwords? (3) Do phonotactic probability and/or neighborhood density differ across CVCs that vary in consonant age of acquisition? The results showed significant differences in phonotactic probability and neighborhood density for the child versus adult corpora, replicating prior findings. The impact of this difference on future studies will depend on the level of precision needed when specifying probability and density. In addition, significant and large differences in phonotactic probability and neighborhood density were detected between real words and nonwords, which may present methodological challenges for future research. Finally, CVCs composed of earlier-acquired sounds differed significantly in probability and density from those composed of later-acquired sounds, although this effect was relatively small and is less likely to present significant methodological challenges to future studies.

We present SUBTLEX-PL, Polish word frequencies based on movie subtitles. In two lexical decision experiments, we compare the new measures with frequency estimates derived from another Polish text corpus that includes predominantly written materials. We show that the frequencies derived from the two corpora perform best in predicting human performance in a lexical decision task if used in a complementary way. Our results suggest that the two corpora may have unequal potential for explaining human performance for words in different frequency ranges and that corpora based on written materials severely overestimate frequencies for formal words. We discuss some of the implications of these findings for future studies comparing different frequency estimates. In addition to frequencies for word forms, SUBTLEX-PL includes measures of contextual diversity, part-of-speech-specific word frequencies, frequencies of associated lemmas, and word bigrams, providing researchers with necessary tools for conducting psycholinguistic research in Polish. The database is freely available for research purposes and may be downloaded from the authors' university Web site at http://crr.ugent.be/subtlex-pl .

Given the importance of lexical frequency for psycholinguistic research and the lack of comprehensive frequency data for sign languages, we collected subjective estimates of lexical frequency for 432 signs in American Sign Language (ASL). Our participants were 59 deaf signers who first began to acquire ASL at ages ranging from birth to 14 years old and who had a minimum of 10 years of experience. Subjective frequency estimates were made on a scale ranging from 1 = rarely see the sign to 7 = always see the sign. The mean subjective frequency ratings for individual signs did not vary in relation to age of sign language exposure (AoLE), chronological age, or length of ASL experience. Nor did AoLE show significant effects on the response times (RTs) for making the ratings. However, RTs were highly correlated with mean frequency ratings. These results suggest that the distributions of subjective lexical frequencies are consistent across signers with varying AoLEs. The implications for research practice are that subjective frequency ratings from random samples of highly experienced deaf signers can provide a reasonable measure of lexical control in sign language experiments. The Appendix gives the mean and median subjective frequency ratings and the mean and median log(RT) of the ASL signs for the entire sample; the supplemental material gives these measures for the three AoLE groups: native, early, and late.

This work presents a new set of 360 high quality colour images belonging to 23 semantic subcategories. Two hundred and thirty-six Spanish speakers named the items and also provided data from seven relevant psycholinguistic variables: age of acquisition, familiarity, manipulability, name agreement, typicality and visual complexity. Furthermore, we also present lexical frequency data derived from Internet search hits. Apart from the high number of variables evaluated, knowing that it affects the processing of stimuli, this new set presents important advantages over other similar image corpi: (a) this corpus presents a broad number of subcategories and images; for example, this will permit researchers to select stimuli of appropriate difficulty as required, (e.g., to deal with problems derived from ceiling effects); (b) the fact of using coloured stimuli provides a more realistic, ecologically-valid, representation of real life objects. In sum, this set of stimuli provides a useful tool for research on visual object- and word-processing, both in neurological patients and in healthy controls.

This article presents a new corpus of 820 words pertaining to 14 semantic categories, 7 natural (animals, body parts, insects, flowers, fruits, trees, and vegetables) and 7 man-made (buildings, clothing, furniture, kitchen utensils, musical instruments, tools, and vehicles); each word in the database was collected empirically in a previous exemplar generation study. In the present study, 152 Spanish speakers provided data for four psycholinguistic variables known to affect lexical-semantic processing in both neurologically intact and brain-damaged participants: age of acquisition, familiarity, manipulability, and typicality. Furthermore, we collected lexical frequency data derived from Internet search hits, plus three additional Spanish lexical frequency indexes. Word length, number of syllables, and the proportion of respondents citing the exemplar as a category member-which can be useful as an additional measure of typicality-are also provided. Reliability and validity indexes showed that our items display characteristics similar to those of other corpora. Overall, this new corpus of words provides a useful tool for scientists engaged in cognitive- and neuroscience-based research focused on examining language, memory, and object processing. The full set of norms can be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Snodgrass {\&} Vanderwart (1980) standardized a set of 260 pictures in the USA for use in studies of cognitive processes that employ pictured objects as laboratory analogues of object themselves. Since then similar norms for this set were obtained in Britain, Spain, Japan and Iceland and a larger set of 400 pictures (including the original 260: Cycowicz et al., 1997) was studied in France and Brazil. The present article provides a comparison of the norms obtained in Brazil and internationally. The pattern of correlations among the Brazilian and other standardizations were equivalent to that previously observed: despite pictures being judged to be of similar familiarity and visual complexity (high positive correlations), name agreement was less correlated, possibly due to differences in the languages spoken in each country and/or in the sample size used in each study. Results confirm the adequacy of the Brazilian norms.

For 84 unique topic-vehicle pairs (e.g., knowledge-power), participants produced associated properties for the topics (e.g., knowledge), vehicles (e.g., power), metaphors (knowledge is power), and similes (knowledge is like power). For these properties, we also obtained frequency, saliency, and connotativeness scores (i.e., how much the properties deviated from the denotative or literal meaning). In addition, we examined whether expression type (metaphor vs. simile) impacted the interpretations produced. We found that metaphors activated more salient properties than did similes, but the connotativeness levels for metaphor and simile salient properties were similar. Also, the two types of expressions did not differ across a wide range of measures collected: aptness, conventionality, familiarity, and interpretive diversity scores. Combined with the property lists, these interpretation norms constitute a thorough collection of data about metaphors and similes, employing the same topic-vehicle words, which can be used in psycholinguistic and cognitive neuroscience studies to investigate how the two types of expressions are represented and processed. These norms should be especially useful for studies that examine the online processing and interpretation of metaphors and similes, as well as for studies examining how properties related to metaphors and similes affect the interpretations produced.

This paper presents Icelandic norms for the widely used pictorial stimuli of Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980). Norms are presented for name agreement, familiarity, imageability, rated and objective age-of-acquisition (AoA) of vocabulary, and word frequency. The ratings were collected from 103 adult participants while the objective AoA values were collected from 279 children, 2.5-11 years of age. The present norms are in many respects similar to those already collected for other language groups indicating that the stimuli will be useful for further psychological studies in Iceland. The rated AoA values show a high correlation with objective AoA (r = 0.718) thus confirming previous studies conducted with English speaking participants that rated AoA is a relatively valid measure of objective AoA. However, word frequency and familiarity are more closely correlated with rated AoA than with objective AoA indicating that these factors play some role in the ratings. Objective AoA norms are therefore to be preferred in studies of cognitive processes.

Human faces are fundamentally dynamic, but experimental investigations of face perception have traditionally relied on static images of faces. Although naturalistic videos of actors have been used with success in some contexts, much research in neuroscience and psychophysics demands carefully controlled stimuli. In this article, we describe a novel set of computer-generated, dynamic face stimuli. These grayscale faces are tightly controlled for low- and high-level visual properties. All faces are standardized in terms of size, luminance, location, and the size of facial features. Each face begins with a neutral pose and transitions to an expression over the course of 30 frames. Altogether, 222 stimuli were created, spanning three different categories of movement: (1) an affective movement (fearful face), (2) a neutral movement (close-lipped, puffed cheeks with open eyes), and (3) a biologically impossible movement (upward dislocation of eyes and mouth). To determine whether early brain responses sensitive to low-level visual features differed between the expressions, we measured the occipital P100 event-related potential, which is known to reflect differences in early stages of visual processing, and the N170, which reflects structural encoding of faces. We found no differences between the faces at the P100, indicating that different face categories were well matched on low-level image properties. This database provides researchers with a well-controlled set of dynamic faces, controlled for low-level image characteristics, that are applicable to a range of research questions in social perception.

Many studies have shown that how words are processed in a variety of language-related tasks is affected by their age of acquisition (AoA). Most AoA norms have been collected for nouns, a fact that limits the extent to which verb stimuli can be adequately manipulated and controlled in empirical studies. With the aim of increasing the number of verbs with AoA values in Spanish, 900 college students were recruited to provide subjective estimates for a total of 4,640 infinitive and reflexive forms. An AoA score for each verb was obtained by averaging the responses of the participants, and these norms were included, together with additional quantitative information (standard deviations, ranges, and z scores), in a database that can be downloaded with this article as supplemental materials.

We present the German adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW; Bradley {\&} Lang in Technical Report No. C-1. Gainsville: University of Florida, Center for Research in Psychophysiology). A total of 1,003 Words-German translations of the ANEW material-were rated on a total of six dimensions: The classic ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance (as in the ANEW corpus) were extended with additional arousal ratings using a slightly different scale (see BAWL: V{\~{o}} et al. in Behavior Research Methods 41: 531-538, 2009; V{\~{o}}, Jacobs, {\&} Conrad in Behavior Research Methods 38: 606-609, 2006), along with ratings of imageability and potency. Measures of several objective psycholinguistic variables (different types of word frequency counts, grammatical class, number of letters, number of syllables, and number of orthographic neighbors) for the words were also added, so as to further facilitate the use of this new database in psycholinguistic research. These norms can be downloaded as supplemental materials with this article.

Availability of databases is a necessity in the speech processing field. The publically available databases in Arabic language are few. In this paper we describe a rich database for Arabic language. The database is rich in many dimensions: in text, environments, microphone type, number of recording sessions, recording system, the transmission channel, the country of origin, and the mother language. This richness makes the database an important resource for research in Arabic Language processing and very useful in many speech processing tasks, such as speaker recognition, speech recognition, and accent identification. The speakers were speaking in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA).

The use of the corpus becomes essential in the development of applications based on natural language processing (NLP). In Ecuador, these applications are incompatible because in each region use words outside the context of Spanish. This article presents the development of a corpus compatible with Ecuadorian natural language words. We applied a identification algorithm to take advantage of local literature and power a new data base. The corpus mounted is verified by a quantitative and qualitative comparison with an open access corpus. The result is the first corpus in this country with high scalability and great versatility. {\textcopyright} 2017 IEEE.

In the vast literature exploring learning, many studies have used paired-associate stimuli, despite the fact that real-world learning involves many different types of information. One of the most popular materials used in studies of learning has been a set of Swahili-English word pairs for which Nelson and Dunlosky (Memory 2; 325-335, 1994) published recall norms two decades ago. These norms involved use of the Swahili words as cues to facilitate recall of the English translation. It is unclear whether cueing in the opposite direction (from English to Swahili) would lead to symmetric recall performance. Bilingual research has suggested that translation in these two different directions involves asymmetric links that may differentially impact recall performance, depending on which language is used as the cue (Kroll {\&} Stewart, Journal of Memory and Language 33; 149-174,1994). Moreover, the norms for these and many other learning stimuli have typically been gathered from college students. In the present study, we report recall accuracy and response time norms for Swahili words when they are cued by their English translations. We also report norms for a companion set of fact stimuli that may be used along with the Swahili-English word pairs to assess learning on a broader scale across different stimulus materials. Data were collected using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to establish a sample that was diverse in both age and ethnicity. These different, but related, stimulus sets will be applicable to studies of learning, metacognition, and memory in diverse samples.

False-memory illusions have been widely studied using the Deese/Roediger-McDermott paradigm (DRM). In this paradigm, words semantically related to a single nonpresented critical word are studied. In a later memory test, critical words are often falsely recalled and recognized. The present normative study was conducted to measure the theme identifiability of 60 associative word lists in Spanish that include six words (e.g., stove, coat, blanket, scarf, chill, and bonnet) that are simultaneously associated with three critical words (e.g., HEAT, COLD, and WINTER; Beato {\&} D{\'{i}}ez, Psicothema, 26, 457-463, 2011). Different levels of backward associative strength were used in the construction of the DRM lists. In addition, we used two types of instructions to obtain theme identifiability. In the without-explanation condition, traditional instructions were used, requesting participants to write the theme list. In the with-explanation condition, the false-memory effect and how the lists were built were explained, and an example of a DRM list and critical words was shown. Participants then had to discover the critical words. The results showed that all lists produced theme identifiability. Moreover, some lists had a higher theme identifiability rate (e.g., 61 {\%} for the critical words LOVE, BOYFRIEND, COUPLE) than others (e.g., 24 {\%} for CITY, PLACE, VILLAGE). After comparing the theme identifiabilities in the different conditions, the results indicated higher theme identifiability when the false-memory effect was explained than without such an explanation. Overall, these new normative data provide a useful tool for those experiments that, for example, aim to analyze the wide differences observed in false memory with DRM lists and the role of theme identifiability.

textcopyright} 2015, Psychonomic Society, Inc. Relative meaning frequency is a critical factor to consider in studies of semantic ambiguity. In this work, we examined how this measure may change across the European and Rioplatense dialects of Spanish, as well as how the overall distributional properties differ between Spanish and English, using a computer-assisted norming approach based on dictionary definitions (Armstrong, Tokowicz, {\&} Plaut, 2012). The results showed that the two dialects differ considerably in terms of the relative meaning frequencies of their constituent homonyms, and that the overall distributions of relative frequencies vary considerably across languages, as well. These results highlight the need for localized norms to design powerful studies of semantic ambiguity and suggest that dialectal differences may be responsible for some discrepant effects related to homonymy. In quantifying the reliability of the norms, we also established that as few as seven ratings are needed to converge on a highly stable set of ratings. This approach is therefore a very practical means of acquiring essential data in studies of semantic ambiguity, relative to past approaches, such as those based on the classification of free associates. The norms also present new possibilities for studying semantic ambiguity effects within and between populations who speak one or more languages. The norms and associated software are available for download at http://edom.cnbc.cmu.edu/ or http://www.bcbl.eu/databases/edom/.

This article presents the NeoHelp visual stimulus set created to facilitate investigation of need-of-help recognition with clinical and normative populations of different ages, including children. Need-of-help recognition is one aspect of socioemotional development and a necessary precondition for active helping. The NeoHelp consists of picture pairs showing everyday situations: The first item in a pair depicts a child needing help to achieve a goal; the second one shows the child achieving the goal. Pictures of birds in analogue situations are also included. These control stimuli enable implementation of a human-animal categorization task which serves to separate behavioral correlates specific to need-of-help recognition from general differentiation processes. It is a concern in experimental research to ensure that results do not relate to systematic perceptual differences when comparing responses to categories of different content. Therefore, we not only derived the NeoHelp-pictures within a pair from one another by altering as little as possible, but also assessed their perceptual similarity empirically. We show that NeoHelp-picture pairs are very similar regarding low-level perceptual properties across content categories. We obtained data from 60 children in a broad age range (4 to 13 years) for three different paradigms, in order to assess whether the intended categorization and differentiation could be observed reliably in a normative population. Our results demonstrate that children can differentiate the pictures' content regarding both need-of-help category as well as species as intended in spite of the high perceptual similarities. We provide standard response characteristics (hit rates and response times) that are useful for future selection of stimuli and comparison of results across studies. We show that task requirements coherently determine which aspects of the pictures influence response characteristics. Thus, we present NeoHelp, the first open-access standardized visual stimuli set for investigation of need-of-help recognition and invite researchers to use and extend it.