Words that have been learned early in life are responded to faster than words that have been acquired later. Subjective ratings of acquisition ages have been successfully employed to study the effect of age of acquisition (AoA). Although a large number of norms exist in many languages, fewer are available for German. Therefore, subjective AoA ratings for 3,259 German words were collected online, includ-ing 2,363 nouns and 473 verbs. These words were presented in lists of 140 words, and participants rated the age in years at which they had first learned each word. A split-half correla-tion testified to a high internal reliability. There were also high correlations with rated AoA values for subsets of the items that had been collected in previous studies, in both German and English. Age and gender were found to influence the ratings very weakly, in that older and male participants tended to give slightly higher age ratings. Education, multilingualism, and frequent usage of languages other than German did not exert an influence on the rating values. These new ratings will ex-tend the currently existing norms available for language and reading research across languages and will provide re-searchers with a wider choice of word stimuli. The ratings are available expressed in two measurements: age in years, and AoA rated on a 7-point Likert scale.

Normative databases for pictorial stimuli are widely used in research on language processing in order to control for a number of psycholinguistic variables in the selected stimuli. Such resources are lacking for Arabic and its dialectal varieties. In the present study, we aimed to provide Tunisian Arabic (TA) normative data for 348 line drawings taken from Cycowicz, Friedman, Rothstein, and Snodgrass (1997), which include Snodgrass and Vanderwart's (1980) 260 pictures. Norms were collected for the following psycholinguistic variables: name agreement, familiarity, subjective frequency, and imageability. Word length data (in numbers of phonemes and syllables) are also listed in the database. We investigated the effects of these variables on word reading in TA. We found that word length and frequency were the best predictors of word-reading latencies in TA. Name agreement was also a significant predictor of word-reading latencies. A particularly interesting finding was that the semantic variables, imageability and familiarity, affected word-reading latencies in TA. Thus, it would seem that TA readers rely on semantics even when reading individual Arabic words that are transparent in terms of orthography-to-phonology mappings. This database represents a precious and much-needed psycholinguistic resource for researchers investigating language processing in Arabic-speaking populations.

The role of objects' motor affordances in cognition is a topic that has gained in popularity over the last decades. However, few studies exist that have normed the different motor dimensions of the objects; this limits researchers regarding usable stimuli, as well as comparability between studies. In the present study, we normed a set of 560 objects on four motor dimensions: the ease with which they can be grasped, moved, and pantomimed and the number of actions they afford. We then examined whether these four dimensions predict objects' naming latency. We believe that these norms will allow researchers interested in the role of motor affordances to have a better control over the dimensions they want to manipulate.

We collected sensory experience ratings (SERs) for 1,659 French words in adults. Sensory experience for words is a recently introduced variable that corresponds to the degree to which words elicit sensory and perceptual experiences (Juhasz {\&} Yap Behavior Research Methods, 45, 160-168, 2013; Juhasz, Yap, Dicke, Taylor, {\&} Gullick Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64, 1683-1691, 2011). The relationships of the sensory experience norms with other psycholinguistic variables (e.g., imageability and age of acquisition) were analyzed. We also investigated the degree to which SER predicted performance in visual word recognition tasks (lexical decision, word naming, and progressive demasking). The analyses indicated that SER reliably predicted response times in lexical decision, but not in word naming or progressive demasking. The findings are discussed in relation to the status of SER, the role of semantic code activation in visual word recognition, and the embodied view of cognition.

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 47(1) of Behavior Research Methods (see record 2015-07948-022). In Table 3, in the column "Lexical Content of the Sentences" in the "Incongruent" row, all five words (“Anger, Disgust, Fear, Happiness, Sadness”) should be replaced by “Neutral”.] Research on emotional speech often requires valid stimuli for assessing perceived emotion through prosody and lexical content. To date, no comprehensive emotional speech database for Persian is officially available. The present article reports the process of designing, compiling, and evaluating a comprehensive emotional speech database for colloquial Persian. The database contains a set of 90 validated novel Persian sentences classified in five basic emotional categories (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness), as well as a neutral category. These sentences were validated in two experiments by a group of 1,126 native Persian speakers. The sentences were articulated by two native Persian speakers (one male, one female) in three conditions: (1) congruent (emotional lexical content articulated in a congruent emotional voice), (2) incongruent (neutral sentences articulated in an emotional voice), and (3) baseline (all emotional and neutral sentences articulated in neutral voice). The speech materials comprise about 470 sentences. The validity of the database was evaluated by a group of 34 native speakers in a perception test. Utterances recognized better than five times chance performance (71.4 {\%}) were regarded as valid portrayals of the target emotions. Acoustic analysis of the valid emotional utterances revealed differences in pitch, intensity, and duration, attributes that may help listeners to correctly classify the intended emotion. The database is designed to be used as a reliable material source (for both text and speech) in future cross-cultural or cross-linguistic studies of emotional speech, and it is available for academic research purposes free of charge. To access the database, please contact the first author. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved)(journal abstract)

Film clips are widely utilized to elicit emotion in a variety of research studies. Normative ratings for scenes selected for these purposes support the idea that selected clips correspond to the intended target emotion, but studies reporting normative ratings are limited. Using an ethnically diverse sample of college undergraduates, selected clips were rated for intensity, discreteness, valence, and arousal. Variables hypothesized to affect the perception of stimuli (i.e., gender, race-ethnicity, and familiarity) were also examined. Our analyses generally indicated that males reacted strongly to positively valenced film clips, whereas females reacted more strongly to negatively valenced film clips. Caucasian participants tended to react more strongly to the film clips, and we found some variation by race-ethnicity across target emotions. Finally, familiarity with the films tended to produce higher ratings for positively valenced film clips, and lower ratings for negatively valenced film clips. These findings provide normative ratings for a useful set of film clips for the study of emotion, and they underscore factors to be considered in research that utilizes scenes from film for emotion elicitation.

We investigated the cognitive structure of emotions in Indonesia and The Netherlands in a series of three studies. Sets of 120 emotion terms were selected based on local ratings of prototypicality for ‘‘emotion''. With similarity sortings a threedimensional (evaluation, arousal, dominance) and a four-cluster (positive emotion, sadness, fear, anger) structure was found in each group. Of 50 pairs of translationequivalent terms, 42 pairs were also found to be cognitively equivalent. With these equivalent terms a good fit of a common cognitive emotion structure was demonstrated in both countries. In a fourth and final study, the location of two social emotions, ‘‘shame'' and ‘‘guilt'', in the common structure was found to be closer to ‘‘fear'' and somewhat further away from ‘‘anger'' in Indonesia than in the Netherlands.

Ss in 2 studies were asked to report on 32 emotional states. Ss were asked to remember instances of experiencing these states and, for each experience, to fill out a questionnaire on appraisal dimensions and action readiness modes. Appraisal patterns as well as patterns of action readiness show distinct relations to various emotional categories, or names; the contributions of both kinds of components to emotion distinction are in part independent and additive. Multiple correlations, predicting action readiness scores from appraisal scores, demonstrated significant relations between particular modes of action readiness and particular appraisal patterns. The results of these studies are interpreted as providing support for the view that emotions can be regarded both as experiences of forms of appraisal and as states of action readiness. Emotions can profitably be analyzed in terms of sets of components, in which action readiness components take an important share. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

In lexical decision experiments, subjects have difficulty in responding NO to non-words which are pronounced exactly like English words (e.g. BRANE). This does not necessarily imply that access to a lexical entry ever occurs via a phono- logical recoding of a visually-presented word. The phonological recoding procedure might be so slow that when the letter string presented is a word, access to its lexical entry via a visual representation is always achieved before phonological recoding is completed. If prelexical phonological recodings are produced by using grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules, such recodings can only occur for words which conform to these rules (regular words), since applications of the rules to words which do not conform to the rules (exception words) produce incorrect phonological representations. In two experiments, it was found that time to achieve lexical access (as measured by YES latency in a lexical decision task) was equivalent for regular words and exception words. It was concluded that access to lexical entries in lexical decision experiments of this sort does not proceed by sometimes or always phonologically recoding visually-presented words.

Sequences of 6 letters of the alphabet were visually presented for immediate recall to 387 subjects. Errors showed a systematic relationship to original stimuli. This is held to meet a requirement of the decay theory of immediate memory. The same letter vocabulary was used in a test in which subjects were required to identify the letters spoken against a white noise background. A highly significant correlation was found between letters which confused in the listening test, and letters which confused in recall. The role of neurological noise in recall is discussed in relation to these results. It is further argued that information theory is inadequate to explain the memory span, since the nature of the stimulus set, which can be defined quantitatively, as well as the information per item, is likely to be a determining factor.

Theories of object recognition differ to the extent that they consider object representations as being mediated only by the shape of the object, or shape and surface details, if surface details are part of the representation. In particular, it has been suggested that color information may be helpful at recognizing objects only in very special cases, but not during basic-level object recognition in good viewing conditions. In this study, we collected normative data (naming agreement, familiarity, complexity, and imagery judgments) for Snodgrass and Vanderwart's object database of 260 black-and-white line drawings, and then compared the data to exactly the same shapes but with added gray-level texture and surface details (set 2), and color (set 3). Naming latencies were also recorded. Whereas the addition of texture and shading without color only slightly improved naming agreement scores for the objects, the addition of color information unambiguously improved naming accuracy and speeded correct response times. As shown in previous studies, the advantage provided by color was larger for objects with a diagnostic color, and structurally similar shapes, such as fruits and vegetables, but was also observed for man-made objects with and without a single diagnostic color. These observations show that basic-level 'everyday' object recognition in normal conditions is facilitated by the presence of color information, and support a 'shape + surface' model of object recognition, for which color is an integral part of the object representation. In addition, the new stimuli (sets 2 and 3) and the corresponding normative data provide valuable materials for a wide range of experimental and clinical studies of object recognition.

The Chinese language has more native speakers than any other language, but research on the reading of Chinese characters is still not as well-developed as it is for the reading of words in alphabetic languages. Two areas notably lacking are the paucity of megastudies in Chinese and the relatively infrequent use of the lexical decision paradigm to investigate single-character recognition. The Chinese Lexicon Project, described in this article, is a database of lexical decision latencies for 2,500 Chinese single characters in simplified script, collected from a sample of native mainland Chinese (Mandarin) speakers (N = 35). This resource will provide a valuable adjunct to influential mega-databases, such as the English, French, and Dutch Lexicon Projects. Using two separate analyses, some advantages associated with megastudies are exemplified. These include the selection of the strongest measure to represent Chinese character frequency (Cai {\&} Brysbaert's (PLoS ONE 5(6): e10729, 2010) subtitle contextual diversity frequency count), and the conducting of virtual studies to replicate and clarify existing findings. The unique morpho-syllabic nature of the Chinese writing system makes it a valuable case study for functional language contrasts. Moreover, this is the first publicly available large-scale repository of behavioral responses pertaining to Chinese language processing (the behavioral dataset is attached to this article, as a supplemental file available for download). For these reasons, the data should be of substantial interest to psychologists, linguists, and other researchers.

This paper describes the development of the Wildcat Corpus of native- and foreign-accented English,a corpus containing scripted and spontaneous speech recordings from 24 native speakers of American English and 52 non-native speakers of English.The core element of this corpus is a set of spontaneous speech recordings, for which a new method of eliciting dialogue-based, laboratory-quality speech recordings was developed (the Diapix task). Dialogues between two native speakers of English, between two non-native speakers of English (with either shared or different LIs), and between one native and one non-native speaker of English are included and analyzed in terms of general measures of communicative efficiency.The overall finding was that pairs of native talkers were most efficient, followed by mixed native/non-native pairs and non-native pairs with shared LI. Non-native pairs with different LIs were least efficient.These results support the hypothesis that successful speech communication depends both on the alignment of talkers to the target language and on the alignment of talkers to one another in terms of native language background.

This is an extension of the 1921 and 1931 Thorndike word books, including the data from these counts and from three other counts of over 4Β million words each. Most of the book comprises Part I, being the list of English words occurring at least once per million words of representative general reading matter. The five columns after each alphabetized entry report (1) numbers stating occurrences per million words, (2) the Thorndike general count of 1931, (3) the Lorge magazine count, (4) the Thorndike count of 120 juvenile books, and (5) the Lorge-Thorndike semantic count. Part II is a list of words occurring at least once per four million words of printed usage but not so often as once per million words. A list of the 500 most frequently encountered words and of the 500 next in order completes the volume. The introduction contains a detailed set of instructions for the use of this material by elementary and secondary school teachers in furthering pupil growth in vocabulary. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

This chapter discusses the 1952 Minnesota word association norms. The Minnesota word association norms are usually known as the Minnesota norms for the Kent–Rosanoff word association test. If the frequency of occurrence of responses to the particular stimulus word is tabulated and then arranged in order of descending frequency, it is customary to describe this series as the associative hierarchy or the associative response hierarchy for the particular stimulus word. There is a general negative relationship between the frequency of popular responses to stimuli and the number of different responses made to the stimuli. The norms have found a wide variety of uses in the experimental laboratory and have also provided a measure of individual differences. The norms provide an index of powerful verbal habits that are shared by members of the college student community.

In recent years, psycholinguistics has seen a remarkable growth of research based on the analysis of data from large-scale studies of word recognition, in particular lexical decision and word naming. We present the data of the Dutch Lexicon Project (DLP) in which a group of 39 participants made lexical decisions to 14,000 words and the same number of nonwords. To examine whether the extensive practice precludes comparison with the traditional short experiments, we look at the differences between the first and the last session, compare the results with the English Lexicon Project (ELP) and the French Lexicon Project (FLP), and examine to what extent established findings in Dutch psycholinguistics can be replicated in virtual experiments. Our results show that when good nonwords are used, practice effects are minimal in lexical decision experiments and do not invalidate the behavioral data. For instance, the word frequency curve is the same in DLP as in ELP and FLP. Also, the Dutch-English cognate effect is the same in DLP as in a previously published factorial experiment. This means that large-scale word recognition studies can make use of psychophysical and psychometrical approaches. In addition, our data represent an important collection of very long series of individual reaction times that may be of interest to researchers in other areas.

This paper presents an analysis of the relations among the associative distributions to 278 English adjectives. These adjectives provide a nearly exhaustive sample of adjectives with Thorndike-Lorge frequencies of 50 occurrences per million or greater. The analysis shows that among these adjectives there are 40 pairs of polar opposites or contrasts. Factor analysis of the intersections of associative distributions among these polar opposites reveals that they are nearly completely orthogonal. There is a sizeable correlation between loadings for the pairs big-little and large-small; nearly all the remaining pairs produce correlations close to zero. Some of the pairs define scales on which it is possible to locate parts of the intraverbal meaning of other adjectives. More than 100 adjectives in the present sample are located on one or more scales produced by the basic contrasts. Not all pairs of contrasts, however, have scalar properties; these words define contrasts but not contrasting scales. Finally, not all adjectives are organized by contrast, though it is probable that a very large number, perhaps the majority, are. Finally evidence is presented for the general linguistic validity of the results of factor analysis of associative meaning. Such evidence points to the determination of intraverbal relations in meaning by partial contextual equivalences plus whatever external contingencies exist between words and the environment at large. {\textcopyright} 1964 Academic Press Inc. All rights reserved.

The development of a set of everyday, nonverbal, digitized sounds for use in auditory confrontation naming applications is described. Normative data are reported for 120 sounds of varying lengths representing a wide variety of acoustic events such as sounds produced by animals, people, musical instruments, tools, signals, and liquids. In Study 1, criteria for scoring naming accuracy were developed and rating data were gathered on degree of confidence in sound identification and the perceived familiarity, complexity, and pleasantness of the sounds. In Study 2, the previously developed criteria for scoring naming accuracy were applied to the naming responses of a new sample of subjects, and oral naming times were measured. In Study 3 data were gathered on how subjects categorized the sounds: In the first categorization task - free classification - subjects generated category descriptions for the sounds; in the second task - constrained classification - a different sample of subjects selected the most appropriate category label for each sound from a list of 27 labels generated in the first task. Tables are provided in which the 120 stimuli are sorted by familiarity, complexity, pleasantness, duration, naming accuracy, speed of identification, and category placement. The. WAV sound files are freely available to researchers and clinicians via a sound archive on the World Wide Web; the URL is http://www.cofc.edu/{\~{}}marcellm/confront.htm.

There is a growing consensus that significant, rapid progress can be made in both text understanding and spoken language understanding by investigating those phenom- ena that occur most centrally in naturally occurring unconstrained materials and by attempting to automatically extract information about language from very large cor- pora. Such corpora are beginning to serve as important research tools for investigators in natural language processing, speech recognition, and integrated spoken language systems, as well as in theoretical linguistics. Annotated corpora promise to be valu- able for enterprises as diverse as the automatic construction of statistical models for the grammar of the written and the colloquial spoken language, the development of explicit formal theories of the differing grammars of writing and speech, the investi- gation of prosodic phenomena in speech, and the evaluation and comparison of the adequacy of parsing models.

In the present study, we tested a computer-based procedure for assessing very concise summaries (50 words long) of two types of text (narrative and expository) using latent semantic analysis (LSA) in comparison with the judgments of four human experts. LSA was used to estimate semantic similarity using six different methods: four holistic (summary-text, summary-summaries, summary-expert summaries, and pregraded-ungraded summary) and two componential (summary-sentence text and summary-main sentence text). A total of 390 Spanish middle and high school students (14-16 years old) and six experts read a narrative or expository text and later summarized it. The results support the viability of developing a computerized assessment tool using human judgments and LSA, although the correlation between human judgments and LSA was higher in the narrative text than in the expository, and LSA correlated more with human content ratings thanwith hu mancoherence ratings. Finally, theholistic methods were found to be more reliable than the componential methods analyzed in this study.

Two experiments (modeled after J. Deese's 1959 study) revealed remarkable levels of false recall and false recognition in a list learning paradigm. In Experiment 1, subjects studied lists of 12 words (e.g., bed, rest, awake); each list was composed of associates of 1 nonpresented word (e.g., sleep). On immediate free recall tests, the nonpresented associates were recalled 40{\%} of the time and were later recognized with high confidence. In Experiment 2, a false recall rate of 55{\%} was obtained with an expanded set of lists, and on a later recognition test, subjects produced false alarms to these items at a rate comparable to the hit rate. The act of recall enhanced later remembering of both studied and nonstudied material. The results reveal a powerful illusion of memory: People remember events that never happened. False memories—either remembering events that never happened, or remembering them quite differently from the way they happened—have recently captured the attention of both psychologists and the public at large. The primary impetus for this recent surge of interest is the increase in the number of cases in which memories of previously unrecognized abuse are reported during the course of therapy. Some researchers have argued that certain therapeutic practices can cause the creation of false memories, and therefore, the apparent "recovery" of memories during the course of therapy may actually represent the creation of memories (Lindsay {\&} Read, 1994; Loftus, 1993). Although the concept of false memories is currently enjoying an increase in publicity, it is not new; psychologists have been studying false memories in several laboratory paradigms for years. Schacter (in press) provides an historical overview of the study of memory distortions. Bartlett (1932) is usually credited with conducting the first experimental investigation of false memories; he had subjects read an Indian folktale, "The War of the Ghosts," and recall it repeatedly. Although he reported no aggregate data, but only sample protocols, his results seemed to show distortions in subjects' memories over repeated attempts to recall the story. Interestingly, Bartlett's repeated reproduction results never have been successfully replicated by later researchers (see Gauld {\&} Stephenson, 1967; Roediger, Wheeler, {\&} Rajaram, 1993); indeed, Wheeler and Roediger (1992) showed that recall of prose passages (including "The War of the Ghosts") This research was supported by Grant F49620-92-J-0437 from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. We thank Ron Haas and Lubna Manal for aid in conducting this research. Also, we thank Endel Tulving for bringing the Deese (1959) report to our attention. The manuscript benefited from comments

The International Affective Picture System (IAPS) is widely used in studies of emotion and has been $\backslash$ncharacterized primarily along the dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance. Even though $\backslash$nresearch has shown that the IAPS is useful in the study of discrete emotions, the categorical structure $\backslash$nof the IAPS has not been characterized thoroughly. The purpose of the present project was to collect $\backslash$ndescriptive emotional category data on subsets of the IAPS in an effort to identify images that elicit $\backslash$none discrete emotion more than others. These data reveal multiple emotional categories for the images $\backslash$nand indicate that this image set has great potential in the investigation of discrete emotions. This $\backslash$narticle makes these data available to researchers with such interests.

SUMMARY : A lexical database for contemporary french on internet :LEXIQUEWe pr{\'{e}}sent a new lexical database of French, named Lexique. Based on acorpus oftexts written since 1950 which contained 31 million words, Lexiqueyields 130 000 entries including the inflected forms of verbs, nouns andadjectives. Each entry provides several kinds of information includingfrequency, gender, number, phonological form, graphemic and phonemicunicity points. Several tables give additional statistics such as the frequencies ofvarious units : letters, bigrams, trigrams, phon{\`{e}}mes and syllables. Thedatabase is available for free on the Internet.Key words : word r{\'{e}}cognition, database, frequencies

We examine the use of film subtitles as an approximation of word frequencies in human interactions. Because subtitle files are widely available on the Internet, they may present a fast and easy way to obtain word frequency measures in language registers other than text writing. We compiled a corpus of 52 million French words, coming from a variety of films. Frequency measures based on this corpus compared well to other spoken and written frequency measures, and explained variance in lexical decision times in addition to what is accounted for by the available French written frequency measures.

A set of word triads are presented that, as stimulus materials for free association, permit the assessment of the relative salience of two varieties of feature enhancement. There are 10 triads of each of four types that differ with respect to how the words of each triad are related. In the first type, the three words share inherent features that determine their membership in a common natural category, words of a second type are from different categories but share a sensory characteristic, the third type share both membership in a natural category and a sensory feature, and the fourth type are unrelated. The distributions of responses to these triad types are presented for a college sample as a baseline for a population of high linguistic ability. Changes in such distributions from 1st to 5th grade are then explored, and differences are shown in the associations produced by 10th- and 11th-grade high school students of high, medium, and low reading levels.

The report presents evidence that a lognormal distribution provides a satisfactory model for the relative frequencies of occurrence of 420 conceptual nouns. The nouns had been randomly selected from the Thorndike-Lorge (T-L) source and had been used as the words in a familiarity scale. The model also provides a satisfactory description of the words from the scale which were common to the T-L count and the later Ku{\v{c}}era-Francis (K-F) count and of scaled words in the T-L count which were missing from the K-F count. For common words, there has been a very small shift toward lower frequencies of occurrence in the time between the counts. The shift originated in frequency changes in words from the middle and upper frequency categories of the familiarity scale. The report suggests that differences in types of words are responsible for differences in distributions obtained by Carroll for all words in the K-F count and the distributions presented here. It is suggested, further, that the familiarity scale continues to be useful.

Word association norms are reported for 200 boys and girls, aged 12 yr. 9 mo.-13 yr. 8 mo. For those words which constituted a retest, analysis showed a high consistency in the primary response. When the primaries were used as S words, Ss frequently responded with the word that had originally produced the primary. In 14 cases, however, a new association was produced and these "chains of association" are presented. ((c) 1997 APA/PsycINFO, all rights reserved)

One hundred institutionalized adolescent educable retardates gave oral free-association responses to the 100 words of the Kent-Rosanoff list presented in an order that was expected to minimize antonym response set. Their responses were tabulated to provide preliminary word-association norms for this subject population.

Multiple word associations to 52 CVCs were obtained from grade-school-aged children. Meaningfulness values (m) for each word, defined as the mean number of associations, were determined. While m values for the set of words increased with grade-age, the rank ordering of these values was essentially the same within each grade-age-sex group. Sex was not related to m values. Values of m when compared with Noble's m' showed significant agreement both for rank-order comparisons and values dichotomized into high and low categories.

Subjects were given the sense impression adjectives from Underwood {\&} Richardson's (195 6a) list of concept formation materials and had to give associations to each word for 60 sec. Noble's (l952) m technique was used to compute association values

The 343 CCC trigrams having the lowest association values in Witmer's 1935 list were re-evaluated. Reliability of ratings was .89 and the correlation with Witmer's values was. 79. Large changes were found in trigrams such as JFK, QJF, LBJ, LBH, HFC, GXM, DHJ, DXB, etc. There were substantial increases in values of trigrams beginning with D. New norms are presented for experimenters who need more precise control over stimulus materials.

A list of 75 CVCVC words and paralogs were assessed for associative reaction time, meaningfulness (a', rated association frequency), and pronunciability. Uncorrected split-half reliability coefficients of correlation were, respectively,.97,.89, and.90. Intercorrelations were consistent with those of a list of 319 CVCVCs previously assessed for associative reaction time, meaningfulness (a'), and pronunciability. Sixty-three of the 75 CVCVCs were added to the list of 319. Intercorrelations among the assessment variables for the combined list of 382 CVCVCs were highly consistent with the intercorrelations based on the list of 319. This larger alphabetically ordered single list of 382 CVCVC words and paralogs containing all three assessment values will facilitate selection of units for the purposes of research.

A sample of 100 CVCs was presented to 200 Ss from widely-separated college populations at the Universities of Georgia and Montana in order to obtain comparative ratings of pronounceability (p). The results indicated high within-population reliability coefficients (r ≥.98) and a high between-population correlation coefficient (r =.975). When the ratings were grouped by fives into 20 pairs of means, the Montana norms regressed linearly on the Georgia norms with r =.993.

2 groups of 21 Ss ranked 20 CVC trigrams, which represented the full-range of meaningfulness values according to established norms, for either pronunciability or ease of learning, and then recalled the trigrams incidentally. 2 additional groups of 21 Ss learned the trigrams by free learning and then ranked the trigrams for either pronunciability or ease of learning. Correlations between mean ranks, group learning measures, and meaningfulness were fairly high.

The meaningfulness of nonsense syllables has generally been considered in terms of Ss' ratings and use of associations and pronounceability. The redundancy of nonsense syllables was quantified by means of their component transitional probabilities, using information-theory measurements. These mathematically derived ratings were in agreement with Ss' ratings of association value and pronounceability used by previous investigators to identify the relative meaningfulness of CVC trigrams. It is hypothesized that the redundancy measures, by measuring the amount of structure in trigrams, are indicative of the potentiality for yielding signification meaning in short verbal units.

Single letter responses to each letter of the alphabet were collected from 1611 Ss. Subsamples were instructed either to respond with associations or to attempt to reproduce letter sequences of the English language. The results differed in several ways from previous norms.

In order to establish the relative dominance of the various alternative meanings of 20 homographs. 100 subjects were given printed lists of words and asked to write a definition for each. Definitions were categorized and the frequency of definitions corresponding to each alternative meaning noted. Substantial variation in meaning dominance imbalance across homographs was observed. A high degree of correspondence between the dominance levels determined in this manner and those obtained by alternative methods was noted.

This chapter discusses free-association responses to the primary purposes and other responses selected from the Palermo–Jenkins norms. A useful supplement to free-association norms is the additional determination of associations to responses that are elicited on the original test. These supplemental norms increase the number of association hierarchies available to the investigator and also provide information concerning the independent probabilities of chains of words. Free-association responses allow the independent manipulation of associative directionality of pairs of words, for example, A and B, that is, it becomes possible to choose word pairs on the basis of either the A-B or B-A associative strength. Listing of the associative probabilities of other words, given in response to B, can greatly increase the size of the pool of associative triads, that is, A-B-C chains. The original norms can be used to discover A-B-C word chains or word pairs varying in degree of bidirectionality. However, such a procedure identifies only a limited number of usable word pairs or chains.

95 CVCs were rated for pronounceability (p') on a modification of Underwood and Schulz's 9-point scale. The correlation between testretest mean p' ratings of the CVCs was .99. Correlation between mean p' ratings of CVCs by two different groups of raters was .96. Mean p' ratings of the two groups correlated .88 and .95 with Noble's m' ratings of CVCs. Stability of the means in conjunction with the correlations is evidence that the p' scale may prove to be useful in evaluating CVCs used in verbal learning experiments.

This chapter discusses single-word free-association norms for 328 responses from the Connecticut cultural norms for verbal items in categories. There are all sorts of ways in which the associative relation between two or more words can be measured. The stimulus items used in a study described in the chapter are presented with the rank and frequency with which these responses were given to the category name in the Connecticut norms listed beside each word. Stimulus items were selected from only 21 of the 43 categories, and the number of stimuli from each category ranged from 10 to 18 words. The frequency with which a word occurs as a response across the sample population of n = 100 determines the order of its listing in the norms. Thus, out of 100 Ss, 65 respond bird to the stimulus bluejay and this response, as the highest frequency response, is listed first in the associative responses to this stimulus. The normative data are presented in the sequence.

This chapter discusses the history of use of the Kent–Rosanoff list of word association stimuli. It describes the two sets of French word association norms and the conditions under which they were obtained. The difference between speakers of English and of Western European languages in the diversification of their responses is brought out by the use of the rank-frequency function. The chapter presents a comparison of few of the main characteristics of the sets of Kent–Rosanoff norms among countries and across languages. A simple and frequently used measure of similarity of responses among normative studies is to count the number of items for which the primary responses are identical. This method can be used to compare norms in different languages, to the extent that confidence can be placed in the translation. The chapter also presents a classification of the primary responses of French and American students and workers in terms of grammatical classes of stimuli and responses.

This chapter discusses homographs. As an isolated unit, the identical spelling and pronunciation of the word provides no clue as to which meaning is intended. Although interpretation of the isolated unit can be influenced by the relative frequency with which the word is used to denote one rather than the other, meaning that only the surrounding context makes clear the intended meaning. Such words that have the same form but more than one meaning are called homonyms. If the two meanings of the word are represented by the same spelling, the word is a homograph. If the two meanings of the word are represented by the same pronunciation, the word is a homophone. A word can be both a homograph and a homophone. Some words are homographs but not homophones. Because homonyms are heavily dependent on context for their interpretation, they provide useful material for studying the modification of verbal meaning as a function of experimental variations in context.

This chapter discusses the complete German language norms for responses to 100 words from the Kent–Rosanoff association test. The collection of German language norms for the Kent–Rosanoff word association test was undertaken as one phase of a larger project dealing with the manner in which linguistic habits can modify aspects of behavior such as perception, learning, recall, and generalization. The normative project was carried out in the following manner: a translation from English to German was made of the Kent–Rosanoff word association test, the translated test was administered to a normative group of German students, and the results were analyzed to determine the frequency of each response to each stimulus word. The test forms were prepared on two mimeographed sheets, with numbered stimulus words arranged in columns of 25 words each, two columns to a sheet. The 100 stimulus words of the Kent–Rosanoff word association test occur quite frequently in the English language are considered, as a whole, to be emotionally neutral.

This chapter discusses free-association responses to the primary purposes and other responses selected from the Palermo–Jenkins norms. A useful supplement to free-association norms is the additional determination of associations to responses that are elicited on the original test. These supplemental norms increase the number of association hierarchies available to the investigator and also provide information concerning the independent probabilities of chains of words. Free-association responses allow the independent manipulation of associative directionality of pairs of words, for example, A and B, that is, it becomes possible to choose word pairs on the basis of either the A-B or B-A associative strength. Listing of the associative probabilities of other words, given in response to B, can greatly increase the size of the pool of associative triads, that is, A-B-C chains. The original norms can be used to discover A-B-C word chains or word pairs varying in degree of bidirectionality. However, such a procedure identifies only a limited number of usable word pairs or chains.

This chapter discusses free-association responses to words from the original Kent–Rosanoff word association test obtained from students residing in England and in Australia. It describes the subject populations represented in the present norms and highlights critical aspects of the procedure. The English sample consisted of 200 men and 200 women who were drawn from seven universities located throughout England. Approximately 60{\%} were enrolled in first-year courses in one of the social sciences, while the remainder were studying arts, science, or education. The median age of the subjects was 18 years, 5 months. The Australian samples were drawn from the universities of Sydney and Tasmania. The test was administered individually, using the conventional Kent–Rosanoff procedure. Response latencies were recorded. For the Australian sample, certain other responses were combined: verbs and participles, nouns and adverbs, and variances of nouns, for example, sit and sitting, peace and peaceful, and worm and earthworm.

This chapter discusses the concepts of substitution, context, and association. The elicited sentences cannot give a particularly biased estimate of word contexts for the stimulus words; however, the substitution task elicits far more antonyms than can be expected on the basis of actual contextual similarities of antonyms. The collocational study involves no editing and gives statistics on text frequencies regardless of the grammatical class of the forms. In connected discourse, nouns, verbs, indefinite pronouns, determiners, prepositions, auxiliaries, nominative pronouns, and copulas are most frequent, with adjectives and adverbs relatively infrequent. For all stimulus words, except verbs and gerunds, there is a significant positive relation between association and substitution, that is, the use of semantically and grammatically paradigmatic words as associates. Where there is high commonality in substitutions, responses tend to be paradigmatic. Where there is a high primary in the precontext or high commonality in the five most common postcontexts, the responses tend to be syntagmatic.

The study was devised to determine empirically the pronounciability values of 200 nonsense syllables. The rating method of Underwood and Schulz (1960) was employed and 201 college Ss participated. Obtained data were highly reliable in reference to previous research and a marked relationship with m' values was found. Relationships with association value and speed of learning were also determined. It is anticipated that the obtained values will be useful as methodological aids in the design of verbal learning studies.

A matrix is presented of the errors of perception made by 135 men and women listening to three male and three female speakers reading aloud different randomized lists constructed from the letters of the alphabet and the digits 1—9, heard in white noise. Data from a short-term memory (STM) experiment, using simultaneous visual presentation and immediate ordered recall of two selected vocabularies of nine letters and the digits 1-9, are cited as evidence of phonemic confusion between letters and digits in STM. Conrad (1964) established a high correlation between the systematic errors made by Hsteners identifying letters of the alphabet spoken one at a time in white noise (auditory confusions), and those made by subjects when visually presented with strings of alphabetic material for immediate ordered recall. Briefly, items which sounded similar were more probably confused not only in listening, but also in short-term memory (STM). Once this relationship between auditory and STM errors had been demonstrated, it was possible, using Clarke's constant ratio rule (Clarke, 1957), to select from the listening matrix subsets of letters of diifering probabilities of auditory confusion. Conrad {\&} Hull (1964) have shown that such subsets selected for minimal auditory confusability, whether of three or nine items in the vocabulary, are significantly better recalled, after visual sequential presentation, than subsets of letters of high auditory confusability. In STM tasks using both letters and digits, Wickelgren (1965) with auditory pre-sentation, and Hintzman (1965) using visual stimuli, have shown that inter-class errors are also related to phonemic similarity. Definition of the extent and relative confusability of letters with digits has been hampered by the lack of a complete matrix of auditory confusions amongst these stimuli. The provision of such a matrix was the purpose of this study. METHOD AND PEOCEDTTKB

To obtain more complete tables of letter sequences varying in order of approximation to English than those generally available, sequences of zero through fourth-order approximation were computer-generated using tables of single-letter, digram, trigram, and tetragram frequencies. Two sets of tables are presented. One consists of 100 randomly selected 10-letter sequences of each of zero to fourth-order material. The other consists of 40 8-letter sequences of each type, selected with the restriction that no letter appear more than once in the sequence.