The research of the word is still very much the research of the noun. Adjectives have been largely overlooked, despite being the second-largest word class in many languages and serving an important communicative function, because of the rich, nuanced qualifications they afford. Adjectives are also ideally suited to study the interface between cognition and emotion, as they naturally cover the entire range of lexicosemantic variables such as imageability (infinite–green), and affective variables such as valence (sad–happy). We illustrate this by showing how the centrality of words in the mental lexicon varies as a function of the words’ affective dimensions, using newly collected norms for 1,000 Dutch adjectives. The norms include the lexicosemantic variables age of acquisition, familiarity, concreteness, and imageability; the affective variables valence, arousal, and dominance; and a variety of distributional variables, including network statistics resulting from a large-scale word association study. The norms are freely available from https://osf.io/nyg8v/, for researchers studying adjectives specifically or for whom adjectives constitute convenient stimuli to study other topics, such as vagueness, inference, spatial cognition, or affective word processing.
Participants rated Dutch adjectives, treating every stimulus as an adjective. Age of acquisition was reported as the age in years at which they thought they had learned the word. Familiarity was rated from 1 = never encountered or used to 7 = very often; concreteness from 1 = very abstract to 7 = very concrete; imageability from 1 = difficult to form a mental image to 7 = easy; valence from 1 = evokes a very bad feeling to 7 = evokes a very good feeling; arousal from 1 = very passive/calm to 7 = very active/arousing; and dominance from 1 = very weak/submissive to 7 = very strong/dominant. Participants could also indicate that they did not know a word.