Perceptual and motor attribute ratings for 559 object concepts

THINGSplus: New norms and metadata for the THINGS database of 1854 object concepts and 26,107 natural object images

To study visual and semantic object representations, the need for well-curated object concepts and images has grown significantly over the past years. To address this, we have previously developed THINGS, a large-scale database of 1854 systematically sampled object concepts with 26,107 high-quality naturalistic images of these concepts. With THINGSplus, we significantly extend THINGS by adding concept- and image-specific norms and metadata for all 1854 concepts and one copyright-free image example per concept. Concept-specific norms were collected for the properties of real-world size, manmadeness, preciousness, liveliness, heaviness, naturalness, ability to move or be moved, graspability, holdability, pleasantness, and arousal. Further, we provide 53 superordinate categories as well as typicality ratings for all their members. Image-specific metadata includes a nameability measure, based on human-generated labels of the objects depicted in the 26,107 images. Finally, we identified one new public domain image per concept. Property (M = 0.97, SD = 0.03) and typicality ratings (M = 0.97, SD = 0.01) demonstrate excellent consistency, with the subsequently collected arousal ratings as the only exception (r = 0.69). Our property (M = 0.85, SD = 0.11) and typicality (r = 0.72, 0.74, 0.88) data correlated strongly with external norms, again with the lowest validity for arousal (M = 0.41, SD = 0.08). To summarize, THINGSplus provides a large-scale, externally validated extension to existing object norms and an important extension to THINGS, allowing detailed selection of stimuli and control variables for a wide range of research interested in visual object processing, language, and semantic memory.

Iconicity ratings for 14,000+ English words

Iconic words and signs are characterized by a perceived resemblance between aspects of their form and aspects of their meaning. For example, in English, iconic words include peep and crash, which mimic the sounds they denote, and wiggle and zigzag, which mimic motion. As a semiotic property of words and signs, iconicity has been demonstrated to play a role in word learning, language processing, and language evolution. This paper presents the results of a large-scale norming study for more than 14,000 English words conducted with over 1400 American English speakers. We demonstrate the utility of these ratings by replicating a number of existing findings showing that iconicity ratings are related to age of acquisition, sensory modality, semantic neighborhood density, structural markedness, and playfulness. We discuss possible use cases and limitations of the rating dataset, which is made publicly available.

The Italian Sensorimotor Norms: Perception and action strength measures for 959 words

Neuroscience research has provided evidence that semantic information is stored in a distributed brain network involved in sensorimotor and linguistic processing. More specifically, according to the embodied cognition accounts, the representation of concepts is deemed as grounded in our bodily states. For these reasons, normative measures of words should provide relevant information about the extent to which each word embeds perceptual and action properties. In the present study, we collected ratings for 959 Italian nouns and verbs from 398 volunteers, recruited via an online platform. The words were mostly taken from the Italian adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW). A pool of 145 verbs was added to the original set. All the words were rated on 11 sensorimotor dimensions: six perceptual modalities (vision, audition, taste, smell, touch, and interoception) and five effectors (hand-arm, foot-leg, torso, mouth, head). The new verbs were also rated on the ANEW dimensions. Results showed good reliability and consistency with previous studies. Relations between perceptual and motor dimensions are described and interpreted, along with relations between the sensorimotor and the affective dimensions. The currently developed dataset represents an important novelty, as it includes different word classes, i.e., both nouns and verbs, and integrates ratings of both sensorimotor and affective dimensions, along with other psycholinguistic parameters; all features only partially accomplished in previous studies.

Quantifying children's sensorimotor experience: Child body-object interaction ratings for 3359 English words

Body-object interaction (BOI) ratings measure how easily the human body can physically interact with a word's referent. Previous research has found that words higher in BOI tend to be processed more quickly and accurately in tasks such as lexical decision, semantic decision, and syntactic classification, suggesting that sensorimotor information is an important aspect of lexical knowledge. However, limited research has examined the importance of sensorimotor information from a developmental perspective. One barrier to addressing such theoretical questions has been a lack of semantic dimension ratings that take into account child sensorimotor experience. The goal of the current study was to collect Child BOI rating norms. Parents of children aged 5 to 9 years old were asked to rate words according to how easily an average 6-year-old child can interact with each word's referent. The relationships of Child and Adult BOI ratings with other lexical semantic dimensions were assessed, as well as the relationships of Child and Adult BOI ratings with age of acquisition. Child BOI ratings were more strongly related to valence and sensory experience ratings than Adult BOI ratings and were a better predictor of three different measures of age of acquisition. The results suggest that child-centric ratings such as those reported here provide a more sensitive measure of children's experience that can be used to address theoretical questions in embodied cognition from a developmental perspective.

Exploring word memorability: How well do different word properties explain item free-recall probability?

What makes some words more memorable than others? Words can vary in many dimensions, and a variety of lexical, semantic, and affective properties have previously been associated with variability in recall performance. Free recall data were used from 147 participants across 20 experimental sessions from the Penn Electrophysiology of Encoding and Retrieval Study (PEERS) data set, across 1,638 words. Here, I consider how well 20 different word properties-across lexical, semantic, and affective dimensions-relate to free recall. Semantic dimensions, particularly animacy (better memory for living), usefulness (with respect to survival; better memory for useful), and size (better memory for larger) demonstrated the strongest relationships with recall probability. These key results were then examined and replicated in the free recall data from Lau, Goh, and Yap (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71, 2207-2222, 2018), which had 532 words and 116 participants. This comprehensive investigation of a variety of word memorability demonstrates that semantic and function-related psycholinguistic properties play an important role in verbal memory processes.

The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms: multidimensional measures of perceptual and action strength for 40,000 English words

Sensorimotor information plays a fundamental role in cognition. However, the existing materials that measure the sensorimotor basis of word meanings and concepts have been restricted in terms of their sample size and breadth of sensorimotor experience. Here we present norms of sensorimotor strength for 39,707 concepts across six perceptual modalities (touch, hearing, smell, taste, vision, and interoception) and five action effectors (mouth/throat, hand/arm, foot/leg, head excluding mouth/throat, and torso), gathered from a total of 3,500 individual participants using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms are unique and innovative in a number of respects: They represent the largest-ever set of semantic norms for English, at 40,000 words × 11 dimensions (plus several informative cross-dimensional variables), they extend perceptual strength norming to the new modality of interoception, and they include the first norming of action strength across separate bodily effectors. In the first study, we describe the data collection procedures, provide summary descriptives of the dataset, and interpret the relations observed between sensorimotor dimensions. We then report two further studies, in which we (1) extracted an optimal single-variable composite of the 11-dimension sensorimotor profile (Minkowski 3 strength) and (2) demonstrated the utility of both perceptual and action strength in facilitating lexical decision times and accuracy in two separate datasets. These norms provide a valuable resource to researchers in diverse areas, including psycholinguistics, grounded cognition, cognitive semantics, knowledge representation, machine learning, and big-data approaches to the analysis of language and conceptual representations. The data are accessible via the Open Science Framework (http://osf.io/7emr6/) and an interactive web application (https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/psychology/lsnorms/).

A set of 750 words in Spanish characterized in two survival-related dimensions: avoiding death and locating nourishment

With the aim of finding quantitative indicators of the survival relevance for a set of concrete concepts, a subjective rating task was administered to a large sample of college students (N = 300). In the rating task, participants used a five-point scale to rate 750 concepts in one of two survival-relevant dimensions, providing their own judgment about the relevance of each concept in a situation in which either avoiding death (AD) or obtaining food (OF) was of importance. The subjective ratings showed high stability and reliability and showed varied patterns of association to potentially relevant concept-defining variables, with correlational analyses showing both commonalities and differences between the two rated dimensions. Regression analyses indicated that, while not likely to modulate word accessibility, survival ratings were related to certain conceptual properties that could be especially sensitive for threat detection. The collected data set provides normative information that can be of use in manipulating and controlling verbal stimuli in future research focusing on adaptive properties of episodic memory and other aspects of the human cognitive system. The complete norms are available for downloading at Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/sf9mb/ ).

Mapping semantic space: property norms and semantic richness

In semantic property listing tasks, participants list many features for some concepts and fewer for others. This variability in number of features (NoF) has been used in previous research as a measure of a concept's semantic richness, and such studies have shown that in lexical-semantic tasks responses tend to be facilitated for words with high NoF compared to those for words with low NoF, even when many other relevant factors are controlled (Pexman et al. in Psychon Bull Rev 9:542-549, 2002; Mem Cogn 31:842-855, 2003; Psychon Bull Rev 15:161-167, 2008; Goh et al. in Front Psychol, 2016. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00976 ). Furthermore, shared features (i.e., features that are shared by multiple words) appear to facilitate responses in lexical-semantic tasks to a greater degree than distinctive features (Devereux et al. in Cogn Sci 40:325-350, 2016; Grondin et al. in J Mem Lang 60:1-19, 2009). This previous work was limited, however, to relatively small sets of words, typically those extracted from the McRae norms (McRae et al. in Behav Res Methods 37(4):547-559, 2005). New property listing norms provide the opportunity to extract NoF values for many more items (Buchanan et al. in Behav Res Methods 51:1849-1863, 2019). The purpose of the present study was to test whether NoF effects generalize to this larger item set, and to explore how NoF is related to other measures of semantic richness, including subjective ratings of concreteness, imageability, body-object interaction, sensory experience, valence, arousal, and age of acquisition, as well as more objective measures like semantic diversity, number of associates, and lexical centrality. Using the new Buchanan norms, we found significant NoF effects in lexical decision (is it a word or a nonword?) and semantic decision (is it concrete or abstract?) tasks. We also found significant effects of words' number of shared (less distinctive) features in each task. Further, factor analyses of all semantic richness measures showed a distinct factor structure, suggesting that there are clusters of semantic richness dimensions that seem to correspond to more embodied semantic dimensions and more distributional semantic dimensions. Results are interpreted as evidence that semantic representation is multimodal and multidimensional, and provide new insights about the structure of semantic space.

Normative ratings for perceptual and motor attributes of 750 object concepts in Spanish

Subjective ratings of perceptual and motor attributes were obtained for a set of 750 concrete concepts in Spanish by requiring scale-based judgments from a sample of university students (N = 539). Following on the work of Amsel, Urbach, and Kutas (2012), the seven attributes were color, motion, sound, smell, taste, graspability, and pain. Normative data based on the obtained ratings are provided as a tool for future investigations. Additionally, the relationships of these attributes to other lexical dimensions (e.g., familiarity, frequency, concreteness) and the factorial organization of concepts around the main components were analyzed. The pattern of results is consistent with prior findings that highlight the relevance of dimensions related to survival as being crucially involved in conceptual processing.

The Calgary semantic decision project: concrete/abstract decision data for 10,000 English words

Psycholinguistic research has been advanced by the development of word recognition megastudies. For instance, the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007) provides researchers with access to naming and lexical-decision latencies for over 40,000 words. In the present work, we extended the megastudy approach to a task that emphasizes semantic processing. Using a concrete/abstract semantic decision (i.e., does the word refer to something concrete or abstract?), we collected decision latencies and accuracy rates for 10,000 English words. The stimuli were concrete and abstract words selected from Brysbaert, Warriner, and Kuperman's (2013) comprehensive list of concreteness ratings. In total, 321 participants provided responses to 1,000 words each. Whereas semantic effects tend to be quite modest in naming and lexical decision studies, analyses of the concrete/abstract semantic decision responses show that a substantial proportion of variance can be explained by semantic variables. The item-level and trial-level data will be useful for other researchers interested in the semantic processing of concrete and abstract words.

Experience with compound words influences their processing: An eye movement investigation with English compound words

Recording eye movements provides information on the time-course of word recognition during reading. Juhasz and Rayner [Juhasz, B. J., & Rayner, K. (2003). Investigating the effects of a set of intercorrelated variables on eye fixation durations in reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 29, 1312-1318] examined the impact of five word recognition variables, including familiarity and age-of-acquisition (AoA), on fixation durations. All variables impacted fixation durations, but the time-course differed. However, the study focused on relatively short, morphologically simple words. Eye movements are also informative for examining the processing of morphologically complex words such as compound words. The present study further examined the time-course of lexical and semantic variables during morphological processing. A total of 120 English compound words that varied in familiarity, AoA, semantic transparency, lexeme meaning dominance, sensory experience rating (SER), and imageability were selected. The impact of these variables on fixation durations was examined when length, word frequency, and lexeme frequencies were controlled in a regression model. The most robust effects were found for familiarity and AoA, indicating that a reader's experience with compound words significantly impacts compound recognition. These results provide insight into semantic processing of morphologically complex words during reading.

A database of 629 English compound words: ratings of familiarity, lexeme meaning dominance, semantic transparency, age of acquisition, imageability, and sensory experience

Since the work of Taft and Forster (1976), a growing literature has examined how English compound words are recognized and organized in the mental lexicon. Much of this research has focused on whether compound words are decomposed during recognition by manipulating the word frequencies of their lexemes. However, many variables may impact morphological processing, including relational semantic variables such as semantic transparency, as well as additional form-related and semantic variables. In the present study, ratings were collected on 629 English compound words for six variables [familiarity, age of acquisition (AoA), semantic transparency, lexeme meaning dominance (LMD), imageability, and sensory experience ratings (SER)]. All of the compound words selected for this study are contained within the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007), which made it possible to use a regression approach to examine the predictive power of these variables for lexical decision and word naming performance. Analyses indicated that familiarity, AoA, imageability, and SER were all significant predictors of both lexical decision and word naming performance when they were added separately to a model containing the length and frequency of the compounds, as well as the lexeme frequencies. In addition, rated semantic transparency also predicted lexical decision performance. The database of English compound words should be beneficial to word recognition researchers who are interested in selecting items for experiments on compound words, and it will also allow researchers to conduct further analyses using the available data combined with word recognition times included in the English Lexicon Project.

Sensory experience ratings (SERs) for 1,659 French words: Relationships with other psycholinguistic variables and visual word recognition

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

Close, but no garlic: Perceptuomotor and event knowledge activation during language comprehension

Recent research has shown that language comprehension is guided by knowledge about the organization of objects and events in long-term memory. We use event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to determine the extent to which perceptuomotor object knowledge and event knowledge are immediately activated during incremental language processing. Event-related but anomalous sentence continuations preceded by single-sentence event descriptions elicited reduced N400s, despite their poor fit within local sentence contexts. Anomalous words sharing particular sensory or motor attributes with contextually expected words also elicited reduced N400s, despite being inconsistent with global context (i.e., event information). We rule out plausibility as an explanation for both relatedness effects. We show that perceptuomotor-related facilitation is not due to lexical priming between words in the local context and the target or to associative or categorical relationships between expected and unexpected targets. Overall our results are consistent with the immediate and incremental activation of perceptual and motor object knowledge and generalized event knowledge during sentence processing.

Effects of relative embodiment in lexical and semantic processing of verbs

Research examining semantic richness effects in visual word recognition has shown that multiple dimensions of meaning are activated in the process of word recognition (e.g., Yap et al., 2012). This research has, however, been limited to nouns. In the present research we extended the semantic richness approach to verb stimuli in order to investigate how verb meanings are represented. We characterized a dimension of relative embodiment for verbs, based on the bodily sense described by Borghi and Cimatti (2010), and collected ratings on that dimension for 687 English verbs. The relative embodiment ratings revealed that bodily experience was judged to be more important to the meanings of some verbs (e.g., dance, breathe) than to others (e.g., evaporate, expect). We then tested the effects of relative embodiment and imageability on verb processing in lexical decision (Experiment 1), action picture naming (Experiment 2), and syntactic classification (Experiment 3). In all three experiments results showed facilitatory effects of relative embodiment, but not imageability: latencies were faster for relatively more embodied verbs, even after several other lexical variables were controlled. The results suggest that relative embodiment is an important aspect of verb meaning, and that the semantic richness approach holds promise as a strategy for investigating other aspects of verb meaning.

Norms of valence, arousal, and dominance for 13,915 English lemmas

Information about the affective meanings of words is used by researchers working on emotions and moods, word recognition and memory, and text-based sentiment analysis. Three components of emotions are traditionally distinguished: valence (the pleasantness of a stimulus), arousal (the intensity of emotion provoked by a stimulus), and dominance (the degree of control exerted by a stimulus). Thus far, nearly all research has been based on the ANEW norms collected by Bradley and Lang (1999) for 1,034 words. We extended that database to nearly 14,000 English lemmas, providing researchers with a much richer source of information, including gender, age, and educational differences in emotion norms. As an example of the new possibilities, we included stimuli from nearly all of the category norms (e.g., types of diseases, occupations, and taboo words) collected by Van Overschelde, Rawson, and Dunlosky (Journal of Memory and Language 50:289-335, 2004), making it possible to include affect in studies of semantic memory.

Alive and grasping: stable and rapid semantic access to an object category but not object graspability

How quickly do different kinds of conceptual knowledge become available following visual word perception? Resolving this question will inform neural and computational theories of visual word recognition and semantic memory use. We measured real-time brain activity using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during a go/nogo task to determine the upper limit by which category-related knowledge (living/nonliving) and action-related knowledge (graspable/ungraspable) must have been accessed to influence a downstream decision process. We find that decision processes can be influenced by the living/nonliving distinction by 160ms after stimulus onset whereas information about (one-hand) graspability is not available before 300ms. We also provide evidence that rapid access to category-related knowledge occurs for all items, not just a subset of living, nonliving, graspable, or ungraspable ones, and for all participants regardless of their response speed. The latency of the N200 nogo effect by contrast is sensitive to decision speed. We propose a tentative hypothesis of the neural mechanisms underlying semantic access and a subsequent decision process.