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