1358 norm sets
<jats:p>Dieser Beitrag soll ein Schlaglicht auf den Status Quo des web-basierten Publizierens in der Linguistik werfen, indem die Entstehung des World Atlas of Language Structures Online (WALS) dokumentiert wird. Parallel zur Veröffentlichung in diesem Blog wurde der Beitrag bei der Tagung Berlin Open '09 eingereicht und akzeptiert. Was ist WALS?</jats:p>
In this study we present some semantic-lexical norms concerning 'fruit' collected from normal subjects. Modelling semantic fluency needs norms for all the given exemplars: at least for Italian language, only a few of them are available. The category 'fruit' is composed of a limited number of exemplars, and some subcategories can be singled out. On a preliminary fluency task, 84 different fruits were produced, and a further normal sample provided ratings for familiarity, prototypicality and their age of acquisition. Moreover the semantic proximity between each pair of the 32 most frequent exemplars was collected and a cluster analysis has been carried out in order to yield an empirical partition of 'fruit' into different subgroups of exemplars. Besides the main models of fluency tasks, some possible advantages offered by these norms in the study of brain-damaged subjects are discussed on the basis of real data obtained from two normal subjects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
<jats:p>Although retrieval of lexical forms is a prerequisite for language production, research of L2 vocabulary learning has focused much more on meanings and form-meaning mappings than on development of detailed, accessible mental representations of forms. This is particularly true with respect to multi-word items (MWIs). We report an experimental study involving a variety of intra-lexical, usage-based, and interlingual co-determinants of L2 vocabulary learnability pertaining to MWIs. Each learner (N = 60) encountered a randomly allocated set of 26 two-word MWIs (Nsets = 4) semi-randomly drawn from a larger pool of MWIs. Learners were asked to remember either the 13 MWIs showing the form variable assonance (e.g., <jats:italic>change shape</jats:italic>) or the 13 nonassonant control MWIs (e.g., <jats:italic>sound good</jats:italic>). Posttests of form recall revealed a large, durable effect of the focusing task in combination with forewarning of testing. Except when MWI concreteness (a semantic variable) was high, assonance had a positive effect on retrievability in recall tests given after delays of 15 minutes and one week. There was a consistent effect of the semi-semantic variable Mutual Information. Even in the context of a strong focus on forms, form variables are not the only variables that matter.</jats:p>
Age of acquisition (AoA) is a widely used variable that estimates when a lexical item is first understood. Existing English AoA norms have been highly influential in psycholinguistics, education, language acquisition, speech-language pathology, and natural language processing, but have focused primarily on single words. Little information is availed for multi-word expressions (MWEs), despite their central role in language use, vocabulary acquisition, representation and processing. The current study contributes AoA estimates for 80,586 English MWEs using a large language model, GPT-4.1-mini, fine-tuned on newly collected crowdsourced human ratings. Ratings were obtained from 96 US-based native English speakers via Prolific, yielding 47,163 ratings for ~3,999 MWEs. After reliability screening, 3,667 BLUP-adjusted means were used for LLM fine-tuning and validation. Fine-tuning substantially improved alignment with hold-out human ratings. The standard GPT-4.1-mini output correlated with human estimates at r =.67, whereas the model fine-tuned on 3,000 items reached r =.85. A final model trained on all reliable crowdsourced estimates was estimated AoAs for the full MWE list. Results showed relationships with existing psycholinguistic variables aligned with those for single-word AoAs, including that earlier-acquired MWEs tended to be more familiar, useful, and frequent. The estimates exhibited predictive validity against test-based student vocabulary data and explained additional variance beyond frequency, utility, and familiarity. These findings indicate that fine-tuned LLMs can provide useful large-scale AoA estimates for MWEs when grounded in human ratings. The new resource is available via OSF (https://tinyurl.com/3e828fj8) and an interactive webpage has been developed for users: https://cgg-projects.github.io/MWEs/.
Naturalistic paradigms provide ecologically valid insights into affective and cognitive processes but often require costly and time-consuming human annotations. Large language models (LLMs) provide a scalable tool for generating human-like affective ratings that could complement traditional behavioral approaches. In this study, we compared affective ratings of narrative segments obtained from young adults, five OpenAI's GPT models, Meta's Llama 3.1, and lexical-level norms from the SCOPE metabase. LLM-derived ratings of hedonic valence showed strong correlations with human ratings and outperformed lexical norms. When applied to fMRI data, LLM-derived ratings identified affective brain networks that substantially overlapped with those revealed by human ratings. These findings demonstrate that LLMs can approximate group-level affective ratings from young adults in naturalistic contexts and serve as a useful complement to traditional behavioral data collection, while underscoring the need for careful evaluation of their generalizability and potential biases.
Understanding how conceptual knowledge is grounded in bodily experience, and to what extent machine systems can acquire such knowledge without direct sensorimotor experience, are central questions in both cognitive science and embodied artificial intelligence research. Large-scale normative resources are essential for investigating these questions empirically, yet such resources remain sparse for non-Indo-European languages. We present a novel normative database for 3,000 lexicalized concepts in Mandarin Chinese, comprising 11-dimensional sensorimotor ratings and unidimensional embodiment ratings collected from 378 native Mandarin speakers. The ratings demonstrate high reliability and strong cross-norm validity with existing Chinese resources, each of which covers fewer words and a subset of the 11 sensorimotor dimensions. In a validation study, we tested new variables derived from a theoretically motivated metric, Perceptual Strength of Embodiment (PSE) (Huang et al., 2025), together with seven common composite variables, on lexical decision tasks. The results suggest that PSE-Sensorimotor and Minkowski-3 are the strongest composite predictors of lexical decision performance, capturing the facilitatory effects of sensorimotor information on lexical processing. A further exploratory study showed that sensorimotor ratings are substantially recoverable from purely linguistic representations using simple regression models (mean Spearman r =.62 across dimensions), though recovery varied markedly: visual and auditory dimensions yielded higher correspondence than chemosensory ones. Representational similarity analysis further showed that the relational geometry of the sensorimotor space is also partially recoverable (r =.540), consistent with the view that distributional language use encodes aspects of embodied conceptual structure.
Background: The Object and Action Naming Battery (OANB) was developed by Druks and Masterson in 2000 in response to the lack of materials for investigating the difference between the availability of nouns and verbs. This battery has been extensively used in psycholinguistic and aphasia research. The battery has also proved to be a useful tool in clinical practice by speech and language therapists. Aims: Till date, there are no published aphasia assessment tools specifically developed for the use of Saudi Arabic speakers. Therefore, the present study aimed to adapt the OANB for the use of Saudi Arabic speakers. This paper describes the adaptation process. Methods & Procedures: Name agreement data for the items in the OANB was collected from 30 non-brain-damaged Saudi Arabic-speaking adults. This was followed by collecting values for the psycholinguistic variables available in the original battery, which are spoken-word frequency, imageability, age of acquisition, and visual complexity. Outcomes & Results: The Saudi Arabic version of the OANB consists of 50 object and 50 action pictures with high level of name agreement (100% for object pictures, and at least 93% for action pictures), along with the normative data for the variables of spoken-word frequency, imageability, age of acquisition, and visual complexity of the verbal labels for the object and action pictures included in the Saudi Arabic version of the battery. Conclusions: This battery makes a significant contribution to aphasia resources available in Saudi Arabia as it can be used in clinical settings at the assessment stage and for therapeutic purposes for individuals with aphasia. The battery can also be used in aphasia and psycholinguistic research with Arabic speakers.
Previous research has shown that early-acquired words are produced faster than late-acquired words. Juhasz and colleagues (Juhasz, Lai & Woodcock, Behavior Research Methods, 47 (4), 1004-1019, 2015; Juhasz, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-10, 2018) argue that the Age-of-Acquisition (AoA) loci for complex words, specifically compound words, are found at the lexical/semantic level. In the current study, two experiments were conducted to evaluate this claim and investigate the influence of AoA in reading compound words aloud. In Experiment 1, 48 participants completed a word naming task. Using general linear mixed modelling, we found that the age at which the compound word was learned significantly affected the naming latencies beyond the other psycholinguistic properties measured. The second experiment required 48 participants to name the compound word when the two morphemes were presented with a space in-between (combinatorial naming, e.g. air plane). We found that the age at which the compound word was learned, as well as the AoA of the individual morphemes that formed the compound word, significantly influenced combinatorial naming latency. These findings are discussed in relation to theories of the AoA in language processing.
The current study presents ratings by 540 Spanish native speakers for dominance, familiarity, subjective age of acquisition (AoA), and sensory experience (SER) for the 875 Spanish words included in the Madrid Affective Database for Spanish (MADS). The norms can be downloaded as supplementary materials for this manuscript from https://figshare.com/s/8e7b445b729527262c88 These ratings may be of potential relevance to researches who are interested in characterizing the interplay between language and emotion. Additionally, with the aim of investigating how the affective features interact with the lexicosemantic properties of words, we performed correlational analyses between norms for familiarity, subjective AoA and SER, and scores for those affective variables which are currently included in the MADs. A distinct pattern of significant correlations with affective features was found for different lexicosemantic variables. These results show that familiarity, subjective AoA and SERs may have independent effects on the processing of emotional words. They also suggest that these psycholinguistic variables should be fully considered when formulating theoretical approaches to the processing of affective language.
This paper presents research on word familiarity rate estimation using the 'Word List by Semantic Principles'. We collected rating information on 96,557 words in the 'Word List by Semantic Principles' via Yahoo! crowdsourcing. We asked 3,392 subject participants to use their introspection to rate the familiarity of words based on the five perspectives of 'KNOW', 'WRITE', 'READ', 'SPEAK', and 'LISTEN', and each word was rated by at least 16 subject participants. We used Bayesian linear mixed models to estimate the word familiarity rates. We also explored the ratings with the semantic labels used in the 'Word List by Semantic Principles'.
All words have properties linked to form, meaning and usage patterns which influence how easily they are accessed from the mental lexicon in language production, perception and comprehension. Examples of such properties are imageability, phonological and morphological complexity, word class, argument structure, frequency of use and age of acquisition. Due to linguistic and cultural variation the properties and the values associated with them differ across languages. Hence, for research as well as clinical purposes, language specific information on lexical properties is needed. To meet this need, an electronically searchable lexical database with more than 1600 Norwegian words coded for more than 12 different properties has been established. This article presents the content and structure of the database as well as the search options available in the interface. Finally, it briefly describes some of the ways in which the database can be used in research, clinical practice and teaching.
This article presents AI-generated estimates for five characteristics of German words: concreteness, valence, arousal, age of acquisition (AoA), and word familiarity. The estimates were generated using GPT-4o-mini, which was selected due to its good performance in previous studies. Validation studies were conducted comparing the AI-generated estimates with both human ratings and previously generated AI data to ensure their usefulness for research applications. The main results are as follows. The GPT estimates of word concreteness, valence, and arousal show a strong correlation with human ratings but are not better than the best available AI-generated estimates based on semantic vectors. The GPT estimates of AoA are good approximations of human ratings and outperform other available alternatives (except for human ratings), especially after the model was fine-tuned based on 2,000 human ratings. Fine-tuned AI-generated estimates of word familiarity have better predictive value than word frequency for word recognition in lexical decision tasks and vocabulary tests. Estimates for concreteness, valence, arousal, and AoA are available for 167,000 words, which are likely to be known to more than 90% of participants in typical adult studies. Word familiarity estimates are presented for 928,000 word forms. All data and codes, including newly collected human familiarity ratings for 11,000 words, are publicly available at https://osf.io/ghjd2/. The data may be freely used for research purposes, but not for commercial purposes.
INTRODUCTION: The ability to name pictures has been investigated widely in healthy people and clinical populations. The Object and Action Naming Battery (OANB) is widely used for psycholinguistic research, aphasia research, and clinical practice. Normative databases for pictorial stimuli have been conducted in language processing studies to control for various psycholinguistic variables known to affect the availability of picture names. The present study provides Moroccan Arabic norms for name agreement, familiarity, imageability, visual complexity, and age of acquisition for 100 line drawings of actions and 162 line drawings of objects taken from Druks and Masterson. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: 160 healthy Moroccan Arabic-speaking individuals participated in this study. Name agreement values for the OANB items were collected from forty subjects, followed by collecting data for the psycholinguistic variables: spoken-word frequency, imageability, visual complexity, and age of acquisition from 120 participants. RESULTS: The Moroccan Arabic OANB (MA-OANB) comprises 70 objects and 60 action pictures. 77% of the nouns and 68% of the verbs obtained 100% target responses. A minimum of 93 percent name agreement was reached for the remaining items. Norms were also collected for the following psycholinguistic variables: spoken-word frequency, imageability, age of acquisition, and visual complexity. CONCLUSION: The stimuli can be used for various psycholinguistic investigations and also for assessment and therapeutic purposes in Morocco.
The field of false memories has been widely studied in cognitive psychology through the DRM paradigm (Deese, 1959;Roediger & McDermott, 1995), an experimental task used to induce false memories from materials that are conceptually and semantically related. This paradigm involves presenting lists of words that are semantically related to a non-presented critical word, with a subsequent memory test showing high levels of false recall and false recognition of that non-studied critical word. For example, after studying a list containing words, such as "butter", "food" and "sandwich", it is likely that in a subsequent free recall or recognition test, the word "bread" will be mistakenly identified as studied.False memory is generated, in part, by the relationship between the list words and the critical word (Gallo, 2010;Roediger & Gallo, 2016). This phenomenon has been explained by two theories: the fuzzy-trace theory (FTT) (Brainerd & Reyna, 1998), and the activationmonitoring framework (AMF) (Roediger et al., 2001). Both theories agree that, understanding the production of false memories requires considering two complementary processes: an error inflation process, identified as gist encoding in FTT and as activation in AMF; and an error editing process, identified as monitoring in AMF and as recollection rejection in FTT (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).According to FTT (Brainerd & Reyna, 1998), "gist" refers to the general theme extracted from studied material. When a list of words related to a non-presented critical word is studied, both literal and semantic information are encoded. In a subsequent memory test, these literal and semantic memory traces operate simultaneously, providing information about the items. The retrieval of semantic information may lead to considering the critical word as having been studied due to its similarity to the presented words. However, the retrieval of literal information about the studied associates can counteract this effect by providing evidence that the critical word was not studied, a process known as recollection rejection (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).According to the AMF (Roediger et al., 2001), two processes work together to produce false memory: activation and monitoring. Studying a list of words can trigger activation that spreads through the lexical-semantic system, creating implicit associations between interconnected words. This activation is moderated by a subsequent monitoring process that helps distinguishing between correct recall (studied words) and false memories (non-studied words).Even when considering different perspectives, both FTT and AMF agree that presenting a list of associates words activates a non-presented critical word, leading to error inflation. If the error inflation process is not accompanied by its corresponding error editing process, or if this process fails, false recall or false recognition may occur (Arndt & Gould, 2006). Therefore, studying the strategies used to avoid false memories is crucial for understanding the mechanisms underlying their formation.Theme identifiability of a list is one of the essential factors involved in this error editing process (Carneiro et al., 2009). In their normative study in Portuguese, they provided theme identifiability norms for 40 DRM associative lists selected from Albuquerque's (2005) study. Participants were presented with the lists and asked to generate a word that best described the general theme of each list. To study the effect of this factor on the production of false memories, they selected those lists with the highest and lowest levels of theme identifiability. The results showed that lists with high identifiability of the critical word as the theme produced lower levels of false recall and false recognition compared to lists where the critical word was not as easily identifiable. According to Carneiro et al. (2012), this outcome was attributed to an error editing strategy called "Identify to reject," which involves several stages: detecting that all the words in a list are related to a common theme, identifying the word that best describes the theme but is not present in the list, keeping it in mind to avoid recalling it in the future, and consequently, reducing false memories. This pattern has been observed in other studies using lists with an associative structure (Beato et al., 2023;Carneiro & Fernandez, 2013;Carneiro et al., 2012). Additionally, there are other normative studies that provide theme identifiability indices for associative lists in Spanish (Beato & Cadavid, 2016) and in English (Neuschatz et al., 2003).Most studies on false memories and error editing mechanisms using the DRM paradigm employ lists with an associative structure. However, ad hoc categorical relationships are less explored in the literature. Ad hoc categories are spontaneously constructed to achieve a specific goal in a given context, and their elements can come from different taxonomic categories (e.g., "Things that can fall on your head") (Barsalou, 1983). Both common and ad hoc categories can lead to similar memory distortions. While false memories are typically more pronounced for common categories, they are still robust for ad hoc categories (Soro et al., 2017).The mechanisms for avoiding memory distortions in such lists are not well understood. Ad hoc categories provide a valuable tool for studying situated concept representations, which are characterized by their flexibility and dynamism (Barsalou, 2005). Their use allows researchers to explore how individuals organize and retrieve information when categories are not predefined but emerge from context. This is particularly relevant for understanding how memory adapts to new information and situations, adding depth to theoretical debates on flexible concept representation.In the study with associative lists by Carneiro et al. (2009), the percentages of identification for critical words ranged from 1% to 77%. However, Soro et al. (2017) indicate that, unlike associative lists, in ad hoc categorical structured lists, theme identification typically refers to identifying the category label rather than the critical word itself. They used two criteria: exact identifiability, where participants identified the original theme of the lists (e.g., "Materials that cover the ground" for the category "Things that can be walked upon"), and comprehensive identifiability, where participants identified a theme that could include the critical word (e.g., a label that includes the critical word "grass" for "Things that can be walked upon"). Both criteria are important for describing our findings.To our knowledge, no previous studies have addressed false memories or theme identification with ad hoc categories in Spanish. Therefore, the aim of this research was to obtain theme identifiability indices for 70 lists that maintained ad hoc categorical relationships with a non-presented critical word using the DRM paradigm. These lists were created based on a normative study of ad hoc categories conducted in Spanish, which, to our knowledge, is the first of its kind in this language. Additionally, this research aims to lay the groundwork for studying the underlying mechanisms of error editing processes in lists with ad hoc categorical relationships in Spanish.In future research, these data may help in understanding the role of theme identifiability in the formation of false memories. Moreover, having these indices will enable more accurate predictions and better control over the experimental materials.A total of 188 students from the Psychology degree program at the University of La Laguna participated. All participants were native Spanish speakers (146 women, 42 men; mean age= 20.14, SD = 2.94).The material consisted of 70 ad hoc categorical lists, each containing 10 words. Both the critical words and their corresponding associates were extracted from a normative study conducted to collect data on ad hoc categories in Spanish (Alonso et al., in preparation;Benítez, Alonso, Fernandez, & Díez, 2022). Ad hoc categories were selected from various normative studies in English and Portuguese and then translated into Spanish (Barsalou, 1982(Barsalou,, 1983(Barsalou,, 1985;;Hough & Pierce, 1989;Soro & Ferreira, 2017;Vallée-Tourangeau et al., 1998;van Overschelde et al., 2004). The general procedure used in the Spanish normative study was similar to that used by Battig & Montague (1969), with the exception that in the present study both the presentation of the material and the collection for responses were done by computer (see van Overschelde et al., 2004). The participants were instructed to generate as many exemplars as possible for each category within one minute. This study, currently in preparation, will provide indices of frequency, rank, and lexical availability for the exemplars of each category.The lists were constructed based on the frequencies obtained from the normative study. Critical words were selected as those with the highest frequency within each category, while their associates were the next most frequent words. Care was taken to ensure that the critical words did not appear in more than one list and that no associate was repeated across lists. The selected critical words were primarily nouns (with only 4 being verbs and 1 adjective), ranging from 1 to 5 syllables, with a mean frequency of occurrence in Spanish of 60.86 per million (Alonso et al., 2011).The 70 lists were divided into 5 blocks: 4 blocks containing 15 lists each and 1 block with 10 lists. For the theme identification test, a booklet was prepared with several pages. The first page collected participant information (name, age, gender, and degree). The second page included practice examples to familiarize participants with the task. The remaining pages were dedicated to the experimental lists. Each page displayed the list number and had three blank spaces for participants to write the word or words they believed identified the theme of the list (up to three), along with a Likert scale to indicate their confidence in whether the word given in the first position represented the list's theme. Procedure Data collection took place in November 2023 during group sessions, each consisting of approximately 35 participants and lasting around 30 minutes. Each group studied 15 lists, except for one group that studied only 10 lists. The order of list presentation within each group was randomly determined.Participants began by completing the demographic information on the first page of the booklet and then received instructions similar to those used in previous studies (Carneiro et al., 2009;Neuschatz et al., 2003). They were shown a series of lists in a PowerPoint presentation, with one word displayed every 2 seconds. Before the start of the experimental session, and to ensure participants fully understood the task, two practice trials were conducted. These trials involved the same task as the main session: following the presentation of each list, participants had 50 seconds to generate up to three words that they believed best described the theme of the list. They also provided a confidence judgment on how certain they were that the first word given represented the list's theme, using a Likert scale ranging from 1 ("not very confident") to 5 ("very confident").Before each list, a message appeared on the screen indicating the list number to be presented. The process of presenting the list and identifying the theme was repeated until the experimental session was complete.The spreadsheet file accompanying this report (Theme_Identifiability_Ad_hoc_Spanish.xls) consists of five sheets. The first sheet, "Theme identifiability", contains the raw data for each participant. It includes the 70 critical words and their respective lists of 10 ad hoc associates. The first column shows the participant number, the second column identifies the list, the third column specifies the type of relationship of the lists (ad hoc), and the fourth column indicates the type of word (studied vs. critical). The fifth column contains the words themselves, while the sixth column provides the English translations of the critical and studied words. Adjacent columns include all responses provided by participants in the first, second, and third positions, as well as the confidence judgements related to the first response. Additionally, intrusions are noted-i.e., words from a study list that a participant mistakenly identified as the theme of that list, and therefore are not considered valid responses.The second sheet, "First word", summarizes the total count of responses given in the first position for each list. It includes all the words generated by participants as the theme in the first position, associated with their respective critical word and list number. Additionally, it provides the English translation of the critical word, the total number of participants who responded to each list, the number and percentage of participants who identified a word as the theme, and the mean confidence judgement for each first-word response. Intrusions are also noted, including quantity and incorrectly identified words.The third and fourth sheets, "Second word" and "Third word", respectively, are dedicated to responses given in the second and third positions. The layout is identical to the previous sheets, but it does not include the column for mean confidence judgement. The fifth sheet, "Summary," presents the final summary, showing the most frequently identified theme for the first, second, and third positions for each list.Responses recorded in the database were maintained in their original format, with corrections made only for spelling errors. Singular/plural and masculine/feminine forms of words were counted separately.Table 1, available as supplementary material, shows the 70 critical words with their corresponding list identifier and English translation, the number of participants who responded to each list, the number of different themes given as the first response, the percentage of participants who indicated the critical word (comprehensive identification) as the theme of the list in the first position, and the mean confidence rating for the critical word as the first response. Additionally, it provides the percentages of participants who identified the ad hoc category label (exact identification) in the first position, as well as the mean confidence rating for these first-position responses.Theme identifiability is a crucial factor in the error editing process and thus influences the formation of false memories (Carneiro et al., 2009;Soro et al., 2017). However, the study of false memories in ad hoc categorical lists and the factors contributing to their formation remain unexplored in Spanish. Therefore, this study aimed to provide theme identifiability indices for 70 ad hoc lists within the framework of the DRM paradigm in Spanish.When examining identifiability levels using the same approach as in studies with associative lists (Carneiro et al., 2009), where the critical word is considered as the theme, the levels of identifiability are relatively low. Regarding comprehensive identifiability, the critical word was identified as a theme in the first position in only 10 out of the 70 lists, with identification percentages ranging from 2.1% to 17.2%. On average, the critical word was identified as the theme 0.98% (SD=3.11) of the time in the first position across all 70 lists. When considering only where the critical word was identified, this average increased to 6.88% (SD=5.39), with a mean confidence rating of 3.57 (SD=1.29). Given the ad hoc category exemplars can come from different categories, their membership is not immediately apparent without context, making the activation of the critical word challenging.In contrast, exact identifiability showed higher levels of identification. The theme of 59 lists (ranging from 2.1% to 87.5%) was identified in the first position, demonstrating a significant increase in identification compared to when only the critical word was considered. Participants often generated words that, while not precisely matching the category labels, were related to them, suggesting some thematic processing even if not explicitly expressed. On average, the theme was identified 22.22% (SD=23.75) of the time in the first position across all 70 lists. When considering only the lists where the theme was identified, this average rose to 26.36% (SD=23.67), with a mean confidence rating of 3.98 (SD=0.70) for the first response.According to Carneiro et al. (2009), in associative lists, the level of identification of the critical word as the theme is inversely related to the occurrence of false memories. Identifying the critical word as the theme triggers an error editing process that mitigates false memories in subsequent memory tests. However, this assumption may not hold true for categorical lists, particularly ad hoc categorical lists, where theme identifiability might not exert the same effect on the error editing process. Soro et al. (2017) suggested that for false memories to occur with ad hoc categories, a positive relationship with theme identifiability might be necessary due to the inherent variability among exemplars. Their study found no correlation between false recognition and theme identifiability. Instead, false recognition was influenced more by individual factors such as experience or creative thinking. Some participants generated more associations between exemplars, leading to an increased likelihood of errors in a subsequent recognition test.Our results suggest that context plays a fundamental role in theme identification within ad hoc categories, particularly concerning comprehensive identifiability. Therefore, considering the findings of Soro et al. (2017), the participant's ability to integrate exemplars into an appropriate context may significantly influence the activation of critical words. This aligns with the notion that memory is a dynamic process shaped by contextual factors (Barsalou, 2005).The present study provides valuable data on theme identifiability for a wide range of ad hoc categorical lists, underscoring the need for a different approach when studying error editing processes in this context. Our findings reveal a crucial aspect of ad hoc categories: while traditional associative lists tend to exhibit reduced false memories due to clearer theme identifiability, the inherent variability and contextual emergence of ad hoc categories introduce complexities in memory retrieval that merit further investigation. This area represents a promising opportunity for advancing our understanding of false memories.
Résumé Cet article présente des normes de fréquence subjective pour 660 mots de la langue française recueillies auprès d’adultes jeunes (M = 22,6 ans) et âgés (M = 71,2 ans). La fréquence subjective a été évaluée en utilisant une échelle en 7 points, allant de « jamais rencontré » à « rencontré plusieurs fois par jour ». Les analyses montrent que les estimations sont fidèles pour les 2 groupes d’âge. Les corrélations avec les données issues d’études similaires sont positives et significatives. Par ailleurs, la fréquence subjective corrèle (0,42 à 0,65) avec différents indicateurs de fréquence objective issus de Lexique 3,55 (New et al., 2007). Des analyses de régression indiquent que la fréquence subjective des jeunes adultes est le meilleur prédicteur des performances de décision lexicale d’une population jeune (French Lexicon Project, Ferrand et al., 2010). Enfin, les données indiquent des différences intergénérationnelles dans les estimations pour 24 % des mots. Cette norme, accessible gratuitement ( http://www.labopsycho-u-bordeaux2.fr/psycogni/equipe/cognitive/publis.php?login=robert ), propose un nouvel outil aux chercheurs afin de sélectionner le matériel lexical de langue française utilisé pour étudier les effets liés à l’âge sur le fonctionnement cognitif.
In this norming study, for 2100 Serbian nouns, we collected ratings on familiarity, concreteness, imageability, age of acquisition, context availability, emotional valence, arousal, the possibility of experiencing a concept on each of the five sensory modalities (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile), and the extent of the actual experience for the same concept. Based on the sensory ratings, the integrative perceptual richness measures were derived: maximal perceptual strength, modality exclusivity, number of modalities, the sum of ratings, Euclidian vector length, and Minkowski 3 distance. The principal component analysis revealed different factor structure for the perceptual strength measures based on the possible and the real experience. All modalities except the auditory grouped into one component for a possible experience. On the other hand, PCA analysis for the real experience ratings showed that the gustatory and olfactory modality migrated into a separate dimension, suggesting that concepts are less multimodal and described mainly by visual/tactile olfactory/gustatory experience. Finally, we conducted a lexical decision over the entire data set of words. Gustatory, olfactory and tactile strength significantly accelerated word processing when estimates were based on the possible experience. When estimates were grounded on real experience, auditory strength inhibited processing additionally. Analysis of the perceptual richness measures showed that the modality exclusivity was the only measure with the consistent inhibitory effect in all analyses. Because the high values of modality exclusivity indicated the unimodality's tendency, our results showed that words perceived with only one modality took more time to process.
SUBTLEX-SR is a subtitle-based frequency norm for Serbian, the Serbian member of the SUBTLEX family of psycholinguistic frequency resources (following Brysbaert & New, 2009). It provides word-form and lemma frequencies, contextual diversity, and dispersion measures derived from the Serbian portion of OpenSubtitles v2018. **Contents.** The resource consists of two lexical tables: - **Wordform table** (2,198,809 entries): one row per surface form, with frequency from a 50-million-token lemmatized subsample, frequency from the full 64,842-film cleaned corpus, contextual diversity, three dispersion measures (Gries DP, DPnorm, Juilland D over decade buckets), and POS distribution.- **Lemma table** (330,535 entries): one row per lemma, with subsample-derived frequency, contextual diversity, and POS distribution. Both tables are provided in two scripts (Latin and Cyrillic) and in two formats (CSV and Apache Parquet). Methodology JSON files documenting all construction decisions, and a deterministic per-film manifest of the lemmatized subsample, are included for reproducibility. Four figures from the accompanying paper (baseline correlations, register divergence, Zipf distribution, CD vs. frequency) are also included. **Headline numbers.** 64,842 distinct films (the contextual-diversity base); 287.6 million alphabetic tokens in the cleaned corpus; 50.5 million classla-tokens in the lemmatized subsample; year coverage 1902–2020 with frequency data restricted to films from 1950 onwards. **Construction summary.** Source: OpenSubtitles v2018 raw Serbian (178,596 XML files). Cleaning included repair of a CP-1250-as-CP-1252 mojibake encoding error affecting 90.6% of source documents, two-phase deduplication consolidating 178,494 cleaned uploads into 64,842 distinct films, language-script normalization, and contamination filtering. Lemmatization performed with classla 2.2.1 (standard model variant) on a stratified subsample of 8,933 films. **Validation.** SUBTLEX-SR correlates strongly with OPUS's pre-computed Serbian frequency table (Pearson *r* = 0.97 on 498,489 forms; internal-consistency check) and moderately with the web-derived srLex baseline (*r* = 0.68 on 216,260 forms; *r* = 0.69 on 35,968 lemmas). The reduced srLex correlation reflects a register difference between subtitle dialogue and web prose; the divergent vocabulary sorts coherently into dialogue-characteristic classes (negated future-tense auxiliaries, vocatives, interjections) on one side and news/government-characteristic classes (country and region names, politicians' surnames, formal connectives) on the other. **Limitations.** No behavioral validation against lexical decision RT data has been performed for this release; this is being pursued through collaboration with the Laboratory for Experimental Psychology, University of Novi Sad. classla's Serbian model lemmatizes a small set of Serbian forms to their Croatian variants (e.g., *šta → što*, *koga → tko*); this affects all classla-sr users and is documented in the README. The corpus contains translation residue from non-Serbian source films (predominantly English-language Hollywood and BBC content) and some Bosnian/Croatian-orthography forms typical of the BCMS continuum. See the README and methodology JSON files for full documentation. **Companion paper.** Popović, M. (in preparation). *SUBTLEX-SR: A subtitle-based frequency norm for Serbian, with attention to register coverage in existing Serbian frequency resources.* Submitted to Language Resources and Evaluation. **License.** CC BY-SA 4.0. Source subtitle text is not redistributed with this deposit; see the README for source-corpus access via OPUS. **References.** - Brysbaert, M., & New, B. (2009). Moving beyond Kučera and Francis: A critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English. *Behavior Research Methods*, 41(4), 977–990.- Lison, P., & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting large parallel corpora from movie and TV subtitles. *Proceedings of LREC 2016*, 923–929.- Ljubešić, N., & Dobrovoljc, K. (2019). What does neural bring? Analysing improvements in morphosyntactic annotation and lemmatisation of Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian. *Proceedings of BSNLP 2019*, 29–34.
Anxiety is the unease about a possible future negative outcome. In recent years, there has been growing interest in understanding how anxiety relates to our health, well-being, body, mind, and behaviour. This includes work on lexical resources for word-anxiety association. However, there is very little anxiety-related work on larger units of text such as multiword expressions (MWE). Here, we introduce the first large-scale lexicon capturing descriptive norms of anxiety associations for more than 20k English MWEs. We show that the anxiety associations are highly reliable. We use the lexicon to study prevalence of different types of anxiety- and calmness-associated MWEs; and how that varies across two-, three-, and four-word sequences. We also study the extent to which the anxiety association of MWEs is compositional (due to its constituent words). The lexicon enables a wide variety of anxiety-related research in psychology, NLP, public health, and social sciences. The lexicon is freely available: https://saifmohammad.com/worrylex.html
English: This dataset provides cross-cultural name agreement norms for a set of 237 standardized color photographs. The stimuli were selected from the Bank of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS; Brodeur et al., 2010, 2014) or obtained under a Creative Commons license. We gratefully acknowledge Mathieu Brodeur, Ph.D., for authorizing the use and sharing of the BOSS photographs included in the present dataset, for which a CC-BY licence was obtained. Naming data were collected through online picture-naming questionnaires completed by adult French speakers from two linguistic and cultural contexts: Quebec French speakers in Quebec, Canada, and France French speakers in France. The dataset includes item-level norms for each French variety, including the modal name, modal name agreement, H-value, number of distinct names, two alternative names with their corresponding agreement values, and the percentage and count of blank responses. Available lexical frequency measures are also provided: objective frequency norms for France French using FreqFilms2 from Lexique 2 (New et al., 2004), and subjective frequency ratings for Quebec French using FREQ_MEAN from Desrochers and Thompson (2009). The dataset further includes the 237 photographic stimuli, a supplementary file documenting the post-collection data processing procedure, and R scripts used to compute the norms and perform statistical analyses. Participants did not consent to the deposition of the raw and processed individual-level data, or the data-processing log, in an institutional repository. The dataset is intended to support experimental, clinical, and cross-cultural research involving picture naming and culturally adapted assessment tools for French-speaking populations. -------- Français: Ce jeu de données fournit des normes transculturelles d’accord sur le nom pour un ensemble de 237 photographies couleur standardisées. Les stimuli ont été sélectionnés à partir de la Bank of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS; Brodeur et al., 2010, 2014) ou obtenus sous licence Creative Commons. Nous remercions sincèrement Mathieu Brodeur, Ph. D., d’avoir autorisé l’utilisation et le partage des photographies de la BOSS incluses dans le présent jeu de données, pour lesquelles une licence CC BY a été obtenue. Les données de dénomination ont été recueillies au moyen de questionnaires de dénomination d’images en ligne remplis par des locuteurs adultes du français issus de deux contextes linguistiques et culturels: des locuteurs du français québécois au Québec, Canada, et des locuteurs du français de France en France. Le jeu de données comprend des normes par item pour chaque variété de français, incluant le nom modal, le pourcentage d’accord sur le nom modal, la valeur H, le nombre de noms distincts, deux noms alternatifs accompagnés de leurs valeurs d’accord correspondantes, ainsi que le pourcentage et le nombre de réponses vides. Les mesures de fréquence lexicale disponibles sont également fournies: des normes de fréquence objective pour le français de France, à partir de FreqFilms2 dans Lexique 2 (New et al., 2004), ainsi que des jugements de fréquence subjective pour le français québécois, à partir de la variable FREQ_MEAN de Desrochers et Thompson (2009). Le jeu de données comprend également les 237 stimuli photographiques, un fichier supplémentaire documentant la procédure de traitement des données après la collecte, ainsi que les scripts R utilisés pour calculer les normes et réaliser les analyses statistiques. Les participants n’ont pas consenti à ce que les données brutes et nettoyées, ni le journal de nettoyage des données, soient déposés dans un dépôt institutionnel. Ce jeu de données vise à soutenir la recherche expérimentale, clinique et transculturelle portant sur la dénomination d’images et sur les outils d’évaluation adaptés culturellement aux populations francophones.
Understanding the lexical characteristics of Chinese characters is crucial given their extensive usage and unique logographic structure. In this study, we normed affective ratings (valence and arousal) for 3971 Chinese characters. We investigated the relationships between intensity (mean rating) and ambiguity (rating variability) of these affective variables, alongside additional lexico-semantic variables from Su et al., Behavior Research Methods, 55(6), 2989-3008, (2022). Drawing on lexical data from 25,281 two-character words available in the Chinese Lexicon Project (Tse et al., Behavior Research Methods, 49(4), 1503-1519, 2017, Behavior Research Methods, 55(8), 4382-4402, 2023; Chan & Tse, Behavior Research Methods, 56(7), 7574-7601, 2024), we further explored cross-level relationships between character-level and word-level variables. Multiple regression analyses controlling for various lexical variables revealed several noteworthy patterns. First, we identified a quadratic valence-arousal relationship, such that characters with extreme valence ratings (either highly positive or highly negative) elicited higher arousal compared to neutral characters. This relationship was moderated by arousal ambiguity, partially consistent with previous findings (Brainerd et al. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150(8), 1476-1499, 2021a), Second, we observed consistent quadratic intensity-ambiguity relationships across all variables, supporting the quadratic law proposed by Brainerd et al. Journal of Memory and Language, 121, 104286, (2021b). Finally, significant positive associations occurred between character-level variables and their corresponding word-level variables for both the first and second characters. The strength of these cross-level relationships varied across affective and lexico-semantic variables and may further be influenced by semantic transparency. Overall, our findings advance the understanding of affective and semantic features of Chinese characters and offer insights into the cross-level integration of characters' and words' lexical characteristics. The data reported in this paper are available at: https://osf.io/kh4yx.
Aims and objectives: English has become the dominant donor language for many languages, including Croatian. Perception of English loanwords has mainly been investigated through corpus-based studies or attitude questionnaires. At the same time, normative data for unadapted English loanwords are still mainly unavailable. This study aims to fill that gap by collecting affective and lexico-semantic norms for unadapted English loanwords in Croatian. Methodology: Valence, arousal, familiarity, and concreteness ratings for unadapted English loanwords and three types of Croatian equivalents were collected from 565 participants. Data and analysis: Affective and lexico-semantic norms for each word on the four variables are available in the database. In addition, the relationship between different variables was examined. Finally, the differences between English loanwords and three types of Croatian equivalents (in-context, out-of-context, and adapted forms) are reported. Findings: Valence ratings for unadapted English loanwords differed from out-of-context equivalents and adapted forms. Unadapted English loanwords were rated as more arousing than Croatian equivalents. Finally, unadapted English loanwords were less familiar and less concrete than in-context and out-of-context equivalents. The findings suggest that Croatian speakers perceive unadapted English loanwords differently on affective and lexico-semantic levels compared with Croatian equivalents. Originality: This is the first study to provide affective and lexical norms for 391 most frequent unadapted English loanwords in Croatian. Implications: The reported normative data will contribute to the existing knowledge about the processing of English loanwords by enabling experimental research on this topic.
Abstract: Subjective ratings of dimensions of lexical meaning have long been used in experimental psychology and psycholinguistics―for example, in experimental studies of memory, lexical processing, and brain function. Three such dimensions of lexical meaning are concreteness (vs abstractness), emotional valence (degree of pleasantness), and arousal (degree of excitement). Ratings have typically been obtained by presenting lexical items to multiple respondents who rate each item on a Likert scale, after which the ratings for each item are averaged. For some dimensions of meaning and for some languages, ratings of many thousands of single words are freely available; but even for English there are as yet no remotely similar-size collections of ratings for multiword expressions (MWEs), such as collocations and spaced compound nouns. Researchers, including researchers of L2 vocabulary acquisition, may therefore wonder how well a MWE’s level of concreteness, valence or arousal can be estimated from the ratings of its constituent words. This article reports a study which addressed that question, concluding that MWE ratings derived from constituent word ratings must be used with caution. The study has doubled the e)xisting small stock of English MWEs rated for arousal and valence. The data: The spreadsheet relates to seven correlational studies of which five concern concreteness and one each concern valence and arousal. The focal data in each substudy consist of a column of subjective ratings of (a) MWEs as wholes and (b) mean ratings, i.e., (rating of word 1 + rating of word 2) / 2.The concreteness ratings mostly come from Brysbaert, Warriner, and Kuperman (2014) although for study two some of the word ratings come from the MRC Psycholinguistic Database (Coltheart, 1981; Wilson, 1988). The great majority of the MWE ratings of valence and arousal were collected by me through Amazon Mechanical Turk; some stem from Warriner, Kuperman, and Brysbaert (2013). All the word ratings stem from Warriner et al. An additional crucial variable in one study (Study 6, Valence) is the valence rating of the most-valenced constituent word--i.e., the word whole rating departs most in either direction from neutral, which is 5 on the 9-point Likert scale of the valence and arousal ratings. The concreteness ratings are on a 5-point scale. Among the data for valence and arousal are ratings for items for which WKB and AMT ratings are available. Correlations between these WKB and AMT items furnish some degree of validation. The data are described more fully in a soon-to-be-submitted article entitled, 'Measuring perceptual and emotive dimensions of multi-word expressions: Are constituent word ratings enough?' <br>Abbreviations: C-word = Constituent word; BWK = Brysbaert et al.; WKB = Warriner et al.; AMT = Amazon Mechanical Turk; MRC = The MRC Psycholinguistic Database<br>ReferencesBrysbaert, M, Warriner, A, and Kuperman, V (2014) Concreteness ratings for 40,000 generally known English word lemmas. Behavior Research Methods 46: 904–11. Coltheart, M (1981) The MRC Psycholinguistic Database, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 33A: 497–505. Warriner A, Kuperman, V, and Brysbaert, M (2013) Norms of valence, arousal, and dominance for 13,915 English lemmas. Behavior Research Methods 45: 1191–207. List retrieved from: http://crr.ugent.be/archives/1003Wilson, M. (1988). The MRC Psycholinguistic Database: Machine readable dictionary, Version 2, Behavioural Research Methods, Instruments and Computers 20: 6-11. Retrieved from: http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/school/MRCDatabase/uwa_mrc.htm<br><br>
Affective word norms are essential for stimulus control in affective science, experimental psychology, and psycholinguistics, yet Urdu remains underrepresented in established lexical norm resources. The present study developed Urdu valence, arousal, and dominance (VAD) norms for a culturally adapted set of affective words derived from a Pakistan-grounded English VAD lexicon, which was then translated and culturally adapted and normed in Urdu. Using a cross-sectional, laboratory-based design, 240 Pakistani university students and young adults rated one of four stimulus lists. The final dataset comprised 320 Urdu words, with each word receiving 60 valid ratings. For each item, word-level means, standard deviations, valid ns, standard errors, and 95% confidence intervals were computed for valence, arousal, and dominance. The resulting lexicon showed broad coverage across affective space, high internal stability of word-level means across repeated random rater splits, and coherent dimensional associations among valence, arousal, and dominance. Category-based analyses further indicated that the item-construction strategy successfully distributed the final word set across distinct affective regions. The primary contribution of the study is an Urdu VAD norms resource that provides an empirically grounded basis for selecting, matching, and interpreting Urdu verbal stimuli in affective and psycholinguistic research. More broadly, the findings reinforce the importance of establishing affective properties in the target language rather than inferring them from translation alone.
<b>Dataset for the paper "Implicit Consequentiality Bias in English: A Corpus of 300+ Verbs", appearing in Behaviour Research Methods</b><b><br></b><b>Abstract of Paper</b><b><br></b>This study provides implicit verb consequentiality norms for a corpus of 305 English verbs, for which Ferstl et al. (BRM, 2011) previously provided implicit causality norms. An on-line sentence completion study was conducted, with data analyzed from 124 respondents who completed fragments such as “John liked Mary and so…”. The resulting bias scores are presented in an Appendix, with more detail in supplementary material in the University of Sussex Research Data Repository (via 10.25377/sussex.c.5082122), where we also present lexical and semantic verb features: frequency, semantic class and emotional valence of the verbs. We compare our results with those of our study of implicit causality and with the few published studies of implicit consequentiality. As in our previous study, we also considered effects of gender and verb valence, which requires stable norms for a large number of verbs. The corpus will facilitate future studies in a range of areas, including psycholinguistics and social psychology, particularly those requiring parallel sentence completion norms for both causality and consequentiality.<b><br></b>
Semantic representations arise from a distillation of multiple sources of information, including sensory, motor, affective, interoceptive, linguistic and cognitive experience. Experience of reward is a highly salient aspect of many human activities, and yet its contribution to semantic processing is not well understood. To address this, the present study took a psycholinguistic approach to measuring and evaluating associations with reward as a facet of word meaning. Behavioural and neurophysiological data suggest that reward processing involves multiple stages and mechanisms. For instance, systems associated with the experience and anticipation of pleasure in response to a reward appear distinct from motivational processes that underlie the pursuit of a stimulus. We sought to collect a novel set of word ratings that capture the full extent of reward-related experience. Initial explorations revealed that reward/pleasure ratings are highly correlated with existing norms of emotional valence. Ratings of association with motivation, however, were only moderately correlated with valence, suggesting they capture distinct semantic information. We therefore conducted a preregistered large-scale study to obtain motivation ratings for 8,601 words. Our analyses suggest these ratings capture aspects of word meaning which are distinct from other semantic dimensions, such as concreteness and valence. Moreover, they explain unique variance in participant performance on lexical, semantic, and recognition memory tasks. We combined motivation and emotional valence ratings to provide a composite measure that might approximate a more general 'reward' construct. However, this did not explain additional variance compared to the individual variables. We discuss the implications of these results for neurocognitive theories of semantics.
The chapter presents and discusses the creation of the spoken corpus LIPS (Lexicon of Spoken Italian by Foreigners). The corpus is based on proficiency exams in Italian as L2 taken at the University for Foreigners of Siena (Università per Stranieri di Siena), and created mainly to enable studies in L2 Italian vocabulary acquisition. The corpus is also organized in a way that facilitates comparisons with the equivalent native speaker corpora. Methodological choices related to transcription norms, lemmatization and part-of-speeh tagging are discussed and motivated. Methods of analysis of native and non-native speakers' lexical richness are discussed as well.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been shown to produce estimates of psycholinguistic norms, such as valence, arousal, or concreteness, for words and multiword expressions, that correlate with human judgments. These estimates are obtained by prompting an LLM, in zero-shot fashion, with a question similar to those used in human studies. Meanwhile, for other norms such as lexical decision time or age of acquisition, LLMs require supervised fine-tuning to obtain results that align with ground-truth values. In this paper, we extend this approach to the previously unstudied features of sentence memorability and reading times, which involve the relationship between multiple words in a sentence-level context. Our results show that via fine-tuning, models can provide estimates that correlate with human-derived norms and exceed the predictive power of interpretable baseline predictors, demonstrating that LLMs contain useful information about sentence-level features. At the same time, our results show very mixed zero-shot and few-shot performance, providing further evidence that care is needed when using LLM-prompting as a proxy for human cognitive measures.
Word frequency is a key variable in psycholinguistics, useful for modeling human familiarity with words even in the era of large language models (LLMs). Frequency in film subtitles has proved to be a particularly good approximation of everyday language exposure. For many languages, however, film subtitles are not easily available, or are overwhelmingly translated from English. We demonstrate that frequencies extracted from carefully processed YouTube subtitles provide an approximation comparable to, and often better than, the best currently available resources. Moreover, they are available for languages for which a high-quality subtitle or speech corpus does not exist. We use YouTube subtitles to construct frequency norms for five diverse languages, Chinese, English, Indonesian, Japanese, and Spanish, and evaluate their correlation with lexical decision time, word familiarity, and lexical complexity. In addition to being strongly correlated with two psycholinguistic variables, a simple linear regression on the new frequencies achieves a new high score on a lexical complexity prediction task in English and Japanese, surpassing both models trained on film subtitle frequencies and the LLM GPT-4. Our code, the frequency lists, fastText word embeddings, and statistical language models are freely available at https://github.com/naist-nlp/tubelex.
. In Study 2, we used estimates and human ratings to predict valence effects in a lexical decision task. Again, we found that norms derived from vector space models and label lists for adults outperformed other combinations and approximated the functional form of children's and adults' valence effects best. We discuss the practical implications of these findings. Additionally, a new set of valence ratings from children (mean age = 12.5 years) for 535 German words is made available.
Normative data for naming photographs are essential in psycholinguistic research. However, image naming norms are typically derived from young adults, limiting their relevance for older populations, who are at greater risk for language impairments due to neurological conditions such as stroke, traumatic brain injury or dementia. Further, lexical retrieval declines also in healthy aging, making it essential to establish norms for older adults to distinguish normal from impaired word retrieval. This study provides normative data for 600 photographs of the Bank of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS) focusing on three age cohorts (40-50, 51-65, and 66+). We examined naming accuracy, name agreement, H values, and response times (RT) to explore age-related differences in image naming. Participants completed a web-based oral picture naming task via video conferencing. Results revealed overall high naming accuracy (mean = 80.5%) and name agreement (mean = 87.4%) across the full sample, with modest variability across the range of adults self-reportedly free of neurological deficits. The 51-65 cohort showed the highest accuracy and fastest RTs. Significant correlations between RT and name agreement and H value support the inclusion of RT as key indices of naming difficulty. We discuss the implications of these findings considering psycholinguistic norms, demographic influences, and methodological differences from previous image norming studies. Novel contributions of this study include normative data for a large sample of middle to older age adults including RT and alternative names, expanding the utility of the BOSS image set for examining aging-related changes in lexical access. The study underscores the importance of including RT measures alongside traditional naming norms for improved characterization of visual stimuli. Open access to the updated dataset aims to facilitate future research into age-related language processing and supports personalized applications in cognitive and clinical settings.
"The Romanian-Latin-Hungarian-German Lexicon, printed in Buda, in 1825, is the last and most important of the normative works written by the intellectuals of the Transylvanian School. Considered the first explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language, the lexicon includes, along with orthographic, orthoepic, morphological, lexical norms and etymological information, a special innovation, taken from the scientific lexicography of the time: identifying plants by their scientific name established by Carl von Linnaeus."
Abstract In the current study, Hebrew norms were collected for a set of 320 colored realistic pictures. Interestingly, participants were adult speakers of Hebrew as a first-language (L1) or as a second-language (L2, native Arabic speakers). Thus, both L1 and L2 norming were compiled. For each picture, participants typed its name, and then rated its visual complexity, familiarity, and typicality on scales of 1–7. To establish the predictive utility of the norms, we examined timed picture-naming performance on a subset of 135 items of the normed pictures. Two groups of participants with Hebrew as an L1 (native Hebrew speakers) or as an L2 (native Arabic speakers), were asked to name each picture as quickly and accurately as possible and their reaction times (RT) and accuracy were recorded. Results showed that norms collected from L1 speakers significantly predicted L1 participants’ picture naming RT and accuracy while controlling for objective lexical characteristics (frequency and length), validating the usefulness of the norms. Critically, these same norms were inefficient in predicting L2 picture naming performance. However, norms collected from L2 speakers were significant predictors of L2 picture naming performance. The study, therefore, carries important general implications for L2 production research based on picture naming tasks.
Exploring language usage through frequency analysis in large corpora is a defining feature in most recent work in corpus and computational linguistics. From a psycholinguistic perspective, however, the corpora used in these contributions are often not representative of language usage: they are either domain-specific, limited in size, or extracted from unreliable sources. In an effort to address this limitation, we introduce SubIMDB, a corpus of everyday language spoken text we created which contains over 225 million words. The corpus was extracted from 38,102 subtitles of family, comedy and children movies and series, and is the first sizeable structured corpus of subtitles made available. Our experiments show that word frequency norms extracted from this corpus are more effective than those from well-known norms such as Kucera-Francis, HAL and SUBTLEXus in predicting various psycholinguistic properties of words, such as lexical decision times, familiarity, age of acquisition and simplicity. We also provide evidence that contradict the long-standing assumption that the ideal size for a corpus can be determined solely based on how well its word frequencies correlate with lexical decision times.
This study is a cross-linguistic, conceptual replication of Lynott and Connell’s (2009, 2013) modality exclusivity norms. Their English properties and concepts were translated into Dutch, then independently tested as follows. Forty-two respondents rated the auditory, haptic, and visual strength of those words. Mean ratings were then computed, with a high interrater reliability and interitem consistency. Based on the three modalities, each word also features a specific modality exclusivity, and a dominant modality. The norms also include external measures of word frequency, length, distinctiveness, age of acquisition, and known percentage. Starting with the results, unimodal, bimodal, and tri-modal words appear. Visual and haptic experience are quite related, leaving a more independent auditory experience. These different relations are important because they may correlate with different levels of detail in word comprehension (Louwerse & Connell, 2011). Auditory and visual words tend towards unimodality, whereas haptic words tend towards multimodality. Likewise, properties are more unimodal than concepts. The form of words is not quite as arbitrary as we used to think. It is connected to their meaning. This 'sound symbolism' was tested by means of a regression: Auditory strength predicts lexical properties of the words (frequency, distinctiveness...) better than the other modalities do, or else with a different polarity. Last, words from these norms were used as the stimuli for an experiment, in which switches across modalities incurred processing costs (Bernabeu, Willems, & Louwerse, 2017). - Dashboard for using Dutch modality norms (336 properties, 411 concepts) and exploring various analyses with them.<br> - A summary may be found here. - The entire data set and analysis code are available.<strong><br> </strong> References Bernabeu, P., Willems, R. M., & Louwerse, M. M. (2017). Modality switch effects emerge early and increase throughout conceptual processing: Evidence from ERPs. In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. J. Davelaar (Eds.), <em>Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society</em> (pp. 1629-1634). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. Louwerse, M., & Connell, L. (2011). A taste of words: linguistic context and perceptual simulation predict the modality of words. <em>Cognitive Science, 35, </em>2, 381-98. Lynott, D., & Connell, L. (2009). Modality exclusivity norms for 423 object properties. <em>Behavior Research Methods, 41, </em>2, 558-564. Lynott, D., & Connell, L. (2013). Modality exclusivity norms for 400 nouns: The relationship between perceptual experience and surface word form.<em> Behavior Research Methods, 45</em>, 516-526.
Dicos 2020: Occitan Lexicon Online Kathryn Klingebiel Keywords online Occitan lexical resources, Occitan lexicography, paralexicography, Congrès de la Lenga Occitana, Dicod’Òc, collaborative lexicography, crowdsourcing, digitization, multimedia database, Occitan dictionaries, Occitan dialects, nòrma classica, graphie alibertine, decentralization of the norm and of description, Conselh de la Lenga Occitana DICOS 2020 (<http://klingebiel.com/occitan/dicos.html>) continues to broaden its bibliographic documentation of online Occitan lexical resources. In 2016, a short article introduced readers of Tenso 31 to the DICOS site (Klingebiel “Occitan Lexicon Online”). The choice of “lexicon” in the title has proven its suitability, with its broad applicability to any listing of lexemes. DICOS was intended to list virtually everything that could provide access to Occitan lexical resources online. The great surprise from that first round of research was the sheer number of files located, more than 200, in a variety of digital formats. My initial enthusiasm has been tempered by three years’ worth of continued searching and evaluation. Revised and reorganized, DICOS 2020 is presented here with this caveat: while the Occitan lexicon is increasingly easy to explore online, in terms of coverage, relevance, and authenticity it is unevenly served by the internet. DICOS leaves readers free to judge individual resources by the degree to which they conform to the parameters of formal lexicography, that is, analyzing and describing the “semantic, syntagmatic, and paradigmatic relationships within the lexicon of a language” (Wikidiff, s.v. lexicology/lexicography). These parameters are neatly summarized in the materials introducing the Diccionari general de la lenga occitana (DGLO): each entry is intended to specify gender; number; grammatical category; etymology or origin; first attestation; linguistic register; definition (in Occitan); translation (into French, Italian, Castilian, Catalan); a pan-Occitan referent (the most widely-used form across the Occitanophone territory); synonyms and antonyms; related expressions; regional variants; proverbs; literary citations and useful sources. Beyond the traditional parameters of lexicography, DICOS 2020 seamlessly accommodates works of paralexicography and of “lexicographie profane” (“crowdsourced lexicography” as a discipline of “citizen science”), in recognition of the three-way continuum of modern-day lexical resources. [End Page 75] The category of “para-lexicographie grand public” (Margarito 172), often accused of non-professional practices, includes such alternative resources as: glossaries of critical editions and anthologies, vocabularies of famous authors, nineteenth-century compilations of “gasconismes,” children’s picture dictionaries (ima[t]gièrs), listings of proverbs, translation sites, sites for language-learners, popularized listings of toponymy and etymology, and blog listings of “les mots de mon patois,” all found in DICOS 2020. Beyond the scope of DICOS, despite their demonstrable usefulness for lexical documentation, are: synonym, antonym, and rhyme dictionaries; travel phrasebooks; manuals of bon usage; spell-checkers; lexicons for computers; software for manipulating lexical data; and even the French-English-French discussion forum and other translation tools found at <www.reverso.net> and similar sites. Most of these works lying beyond the pale of canonical lexicography, “ouvrages qui occupent une marge floue, mais bien vivante” (Margarito 172), have appeared in response to the needs of electronic media and of crowdsourcing. While they comport certain risks,1 these works offer various advantages, including wide-ranging sources, relatively low cost of revision (as against reprinting), and ease of access and consultation. The modern generation of lexical resources has appeared in three stages: (i) digitization of print works (fr. rétroconversion); (ii) production of online dictionaries and databases; and (iii) creation of collaborative projects. Digitized versions of texts are widely available, e.g., the IEO-Paris’ “Documents per l’estudi de la lenga occitana,” with its more than 120 dictionaries and grammars of Occitan. Digitization has significantly modified the format of many print resources: e.g., the twenty-five volumes of the Französisches etymologisches [End Page 76] Wörterbuch (FEW), for the full Gallo-Romance lexicon, and the Dictionnaire de l’occitan médiéval (DOM), whose seven print fascicles (“a”–“album”) have been reworked into a single searchable online database which now covers “a” through “zyrt.” Selig and Arnold look at changes to the entire DOM infrastructure occurring in the course of digitization. The power of html and of the relational database has been harnessed in the compilation of interlinked...
This repository contains all experimental data, including every respondent's survey, the final data set in Excel or CSV format, and the analysis code in R (norms.R).Paper: https://psyarxiv.com/s2c5h<br>The norms, which are ratings of linguistic stimuli, served a twofold purpose: first, the creation of linguistic stimuli (see also Speed & Majid, 2017), and second, a conceptual replication of Lynott and Connell's (2009, 2013) analyses. In the collection of the ratings, forty-two respondents completed surveys for the properties or the concepts separately. Each word was rated by eight participants on average (see data set), with a minimum of five (e.g., for <em>bevriezend</em>) and a maximum of ten ratings per word (e.g., for <em>donzig</em>). The instructions to participants were similar to those used by Lynott and Connell (2009, 2013), except that we elicited three modalities (auditory, haptic, visual) instead of five.'This is a stimulus validation for a future experiment. The task is to rate how much you experience everyday' [properties/concepts] 'using three different perceptual senses: feeling by touch, hearing and seeing. Please rate every word on each of the three senses, from 0 (not experienced at all with that sense) to 5 (experienced greatly with that sense). If you do not know the meaning of a word, leave it blank.'These norms were validated in an experiment showing that shifts across trials with different dominant modalities incurred semantic processing costs (Bernabeu, Willems, & Louwerse, 2017). All data for that study are available, including a dashboard (in case of downtime of the dashboard site, please see this alternative).The properties and the concepts were analysed separately. Properties were more strongly perceptual than concepts. Distinct relationships also emerged among the modalities, with the visual and haptic modalities being closely related, and the auditory modality being relatively independent (cf. Lynott & Connell's data for English. This ties in with findings that, in conceptual processing, modalities can be collated based on language statistics (Louwerse & Connell, 2011).The norms also served to investigate sound symbolism, which is the relation between the form of words and their meaning. The form of words rests on their sound more than on their visual or tactile properties (at least in spoken language). Therefore, auditory ratings should more reliably predict the lexical properties of words (length, frequency, distinctiveness) than haptic or visual ratings would. Lynott and Connell's (2013) findings were replicated, as auditory ratings were either the best predictor of lexical properties, or yielded an effect that was opposite in polarity to the effects of haptic and visual ratings
In this article, we present the results of a study carried out in Bogota, Colombia with 210 university students from five different universities pertaining to diverse socio-demographic groups. The objective of the study was to establish the lexical category norms. 56 lexical-semantic categories used by Battig and Montague (1969) in their classic study were employed. More than 7800 words were collected and organized by range and mode. There are no other studies on this subject for Colombian or Latin American Spanish. We hope that the results presented here will be used both in psycholinguistic and language therapy studies. The collected data were compared to one of the category norm studies made for European Spanish.
While numerous lexical databases provide rating norms for a wide range of words, resources for onomatopoeia remain scarce. Given the pivotal role of onomatopoeia in language development and its potential insights for the relationship between word phonology and word meaning, we introduce the Chinese Onomatopoeia Database (COD), comprising 97 one-character, 380 two-character, 91 three-character, and 183 four-character onomatopoeic words in Chinese (total N = 751). All words were rated by 311 native Chinese speakers for concreteness, imageability, context availability, age of acquisition (AoA), familiarity, semantic transparency, emotional valence, and emotional arousal. We demonstrated high reliability across these measures through Cronbach's alpha, split-half coefficients, and intra-class correlation coefficients (ICCs). Correlation analyses revealed significant associations among these lexical variables, including those between semantic and affective variables. Predictive validity of these variables was also examined using reaction times (RTs) and accuracy (ACC) obtained based on a lexical decision task, which showed that COD variables significantly predicted lexical decision RTs and ACC. Further analyses with two measures, Zipf and logCD, from the Chinese Children's Lexicon of Written Words (CCLOWW; Li et al., 2023) showed that these measures were significantly correlated with all COD variables. Even with the inclusion of CCLOWW-based Zipf or logCD measures in regression models, the COD-based variable still significantly predicted both RTs and ACC. The establishment of the COD not only fills a crucial gap in psycholinguistic resources but also provides a robust tool for future research into the cognitive and developmental underpinnings of language processing.
Word characteristics such as frequency, imageability, concreteness and length are considered good predictors of performance in lexical tasks like picture naming, word comprehension or lexical decision-making. There is also evidence that the age of acquisition (AoA) of words can partly explain aspects of word processing behaviour in later childhood and adulthood (Morrison et al., 1992; Brysbaert & Cortese, 2010).In the present study, we collected AoA norms for 158 nouns and 142 verbs in 22 languages: Afrikaans, British English, Catalan, Danish, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Irish, IsiXhosa, Italian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, South African English, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. In a preparatory picture naming procedure, adult native speakers of 34 languages were asked to name 508 object and 504 action pictures. Words shared among the target languages were retained for the final corpus. Our study followed the typical procedure for establishing AoA (see Morrison et al. 1997) and was performed on-line (see www.words-psych.org). 804 adult participants (at least 20 for each language) were asked to specify the age at which they learned the words in their native language. The vast majority of words were rated as acquired by the age of 7 years, demonstrating overlap in early vocabulary across diverse languages. Significant correlations between all language pairs point to a similar developmental sequence for the words under investigation. No previous study has compared AoA judgements on a shared set of words in a wide range of languages. 'The AoA data collected in the 22 languages provides word characteristics that should assist the design of cross-linguistic psycholinguistic experiments and the preparation of materials for use in the assessment and treatment of language disorders in preschool children. The AoA data are currently being used to control for AoA in the construction of cross-linguistic lexical tasks assessing word knowledge in monolingual and bilingual children.
Sensorimotor information plays a fundamental role incognition. However, datasets of ratings of sensorimotorexperience have generally been restricted to several hundredwords, leading to limited linguistic coverage and reducedstatistical power for more complex analyses. Here, we presentmodality-specific and effector-specific norms for 39,954concepts across six sensory modalities (touch, hearing, smell,taste, vision, and interoception) and five action effectors(mouth/throat, hand/arm, foot/leg, head excluding mouth, andtorso), which were gathered from 4,557 participants whocompleted a total of 32,456 surveys using Amazon'sMechanical Turk platform. The dataset therefore representsone of the largest set of semantic norms currently available.We describe the data collection procedures, provide summarydescriptives of the data set, demonstrate the utility of thenorms in predicting lexical decision times and accuracy, aswell as offering new insights and outlining avenues for futureresearch. Our findings will be of interest to researchers inembodied cognition, cognitive semantics, sensorimotorprocessing, and the psychology of language generally. Thescale of this dataset will also facilitate computationalmodelling and big data approaches to the analysis of languageand conceptual representations.
A pluricentric language is a language that is used in at least two countries where it has the official status of a state, commonwealth or regional language with at least partially its own (codified) norms that usually contribute to the personal identity of speakers. Pluricentric languages have one dominant variant and (one or) several non-dominant varieties. As a result of the political fragmentation of the Hungarian language area that developed after the First World War, and then, confirmed by the peace treaties after the Second World War, the Hungarian language is one of the pluricentric languages in Europe. The article examines the results of close linguistic contacts in non-dominant varieties of the modern Hungarian language used outside Hungary. The consequences of language contacts are highlighted on the basis of lexical borrowings, which are fixed in a specific online dictionary. The dictionary consists of borrowed words of foreign origin used by autochthonous Hungarian minorities living in the Carpathian Basin outside Hungary. In addition to words and phrases that are used exclusively in the speech and writing of Hungarians in countries neighboring Hungary, words that are also used in Hungary, but with a different meaning, were also collected in the database. As of the end of September 2022, the dictionary database contained 5,034 dictionary entries (words). Since this online loanword list contains direct borrowings from many languages of the Carpathian Basin that are in contact with Hungarian (mostly from the official or state languages of Hungary's neighboring countries, including Slovak, Ukrainian, Romanian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, and German), the database is a rich source for the study of contacts between Hungarian and Indo-European languages. Based on the material of the online dictionary, it was found that among the lexical borrowings of the Hungarian language –as a result of centuries-old contacts between Hungarian and various Slavic languages –borrowings of Slavic origin constitute the largest layer of vocabulary of foreign origin in the Hungarian language. The result of the project is a dictionary database that provides an opportunity for a comparative analysis of the vocabulary of non-dominant variants of the pluricentric Hungarian language.
<ns4:p>Over the past decade, there have been several attempts to standardize cross-linguistic datasets. Since language comparison is a notoriously difficult endeavor, it requires tools that facilitate standardization and are convenient to use. The Concepticon is based on a toolkit provided for cross-linguistic comparison and offers a reference catalog for comparable concepts that appear in concept lists. While curating the Concepticon, we found that a variety of studies in distinct research fields collected information on word properties. However, until recently, no resource existed that contained these data to enable the comparison of the different word properties across languages. This gap was filled by the Database of Norms, Ratings, and Relations (NoRaRe), which is an extension of the Concepticon. Here, we present the major release of both resources - Concepticon Version 3.0 and NoRaRe Version 1.0 - which represents an important step in our data development. We show that extending and adapting the data curation workflow in Concepticon to NoRaRe is useful for the standardization of cross-linguistic datasets. In addition, combining datasets from different research fields enables studies grounded in language comparison. Concepticon and NoRaRe include lexical data for various languages, tools for test-driven data curation, and the possibility for data reuse. The first major release of NoRaRe is also accompanied by a new web application that allows convenient access to the data.</ns4:p>
Free-association norms provide essential empirical data for investigating linguistic, semantic, and cultural phenomena in the cognitive sciences. Although large-scale norms exist for languages such as English, Dutch, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese, no comparable resource has been available for German. To address this gap, we present free-association norms for 5,877 German cue words as part of the German version of the multilingual Small World of Words (SWOW) project. We describe the data collection procedures, participant characteristics, and our comprehensive preprocessing pipeline before introducing the resulting SWOW-DE data set. Using data from three established psycholinguistic paradigms, we show that SWOW-DE norms robustly predict performance in lexical decision tasks, relatedness judgments, and psycholinguistic word ratings. Furthermore, we demonstrate that SWOW-DE responses compare favorably with existing German resources and provide a preliminary cross-linguistic comparison revealing both shared and language-specific association patterns, highlighting promising directions for future research. Overall, SWOW-DE represents the largest collection of German free associations to date and offers a unique resource for linguistic, psychological, and cross-cultural research.