400 undergraduates completed booklets made up of words from the Toronto Word Pool. Ss rated the words for imagery or concreteness. Imagery was defined as the ease with which a word aroused a mental image, and concreteness was defined in relation to level of abstraction. The degree to which a word was functionally a noun was estimated in a sentence generation task. The mean and standard deviation of the imagery and concreteness ratings for each item were derived, together with letter and printed frequency counts for the words and indications of sex differences in the ratings. In a follow-up study with 120 undergraduates, norms included a grammatical function code derived from dictionary definitions, a percent noun judgment, indices of statistical approximation to English, and an orthographic neighbor ratio.
Each subject was given one booklet containing 275 words.