Norms for name agreement, familiarity, subjective frequency, and imageability for 348 object names in Tunisian Arabic

Naming in a multilingual context: Norms for the ICMR-Manipal colour picture corpus in Kannada from the Indian context

There have been many published picture corpora. However, more than half of the world's population speaks more than one language and, as language and culture are intertwined, some of the items from a picture corpus designed for a given language in a particular culture may not fit another culture (with the same or different language). There is also an awareness that language research can gain from the study of bi-/multilingual individuals who are immersed in multilingual contexts that foster inter-language interactions. Consequently, we developed a relatively large corpus of pictures (663 nouns, 96 verbs) and collected normative data from multilingual speakers of Kannada (a southern Indian language) on two picture-related measures (name agreement, image agreement) and three word-related measures (familiarity, subjective frequency, age of acquisition), and report objective visual complexity and syllable count of the words. Naming labels were classified into words from the target language (i.e., Kannada), cognates (borrowed from/shared with another language), translation equivalents, and elaborations. The picture corpus had > 85% mean concept agreement with multiple acceptable names (1-7 naming labels) for each concept. The mean percentage name agreement for the modal name was > 70%, with H-statistics of 0.89 for nouns and 0.52 for verbs. We also analyse the variability of responses highlighting the influence of bi-/multilingualism on (picture) naming. The picture corpus is freely accessible to researchers and clinicians. It may be used for future standardization with other languages of similar cultural contexts, and relevant items can be used in languages from different cultures, following suitable standardization.

Characterizing language production across modalities

ABSTRACTThis study investigates factors influencing lexical access in language production across modalities (signed and oral). Data from deaf and hearing signers were reanalyzed (Baus and Costa, 2015, On the temporal dynamics of sign production: An ERP study in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). Brain Research, 1609(1), 40-53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2015.03.013; Gimeno-Martínez and Baus, 2022, Iconicity in sign language production: Task matters. Neuropsychologia, 167, 108166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108166) testing the influence of psycholinguistic variables and ERP mean amplitudes on signing and naming latencies. Deaf signers' signing latencies were influenced by sign iconicity in the picture signing task, and by spoken psycholinguistic variables in the word-to-sign translation task. Additionally, ERP amplitudes before response influenced signing but not translation latencies. Hearing signers' latencies, both signing and naming, were influenced by sign iconicity and word frequency, with early ERP amplitudes predicting only naming latencies. These findings highlight general and modality-specific determinants of lexical access in language production.

Feasibility Study of the Boston Naming Test for the Arab Population

Introduction The Boston Naming Test (BNT) is a widely used US neuropsychological evaluation of confrontation naming for the examination of adults and children with learning disabilities and diagnosis of communication disorders, aphasia, dementia, and acquired brain injury or dysfunction. The purpose of the present study is to evaluate the practicality of the original English version of the 60-item BNT (BNT-60) on an Arab population and the need for a new adaptive Arabic version sensitive to cultural biases and to offer normative data that can serve as a reference for researchers and clinicians in the Gulf region, especially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Data relating to the familiarity degree of the BNT-60 were also collected. Methods This research involved 105 randomly selected and cognitively healthy college students who were native Arabic speakers recruited in Jeddah. The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MOCA) was administered with a cutoff score of 26. The participants were examined for naming accuracy, naming agreement, and familiarity in using the BNT-60. The data were then analyzed and compared with the findings from studies conducted in the United States. Results The BNT-60 was administered to 105 university students from the KSA, and the results were compared with the BNT-60 booklet norms (second edition). Their average performance was noticeably below the norms established by the original test standards. Compared with the participants in the US studies, the participants made approximately 65% more errors on the items including pretzel, wreath, beaver, harmonica, acorn, stilts, harp, hammock, knocker, pelican, muzzle, unicorn, funnel, accordion, asparagus, tripod, yoke, and trellis and 25% more errors on the items including seahorse, dart, igloo, sphinx, palette, and abacus. The item "boomerang" was not compared with the US sample because of differences in the version of the BNT, but the errors in naming this item were as frequent as those in naming the other misrecognized items. The internal consistency among the items' degrees of familiarity was also very high (α = 0.966), and a significant connection (r = 0.837, P < 0.001) was observed between object familiarity and naming accuracy. The Arabic-speaking population in the KSA and English-speaking population in the United States showed very different levels of familiarity with numerous items. Conclusion The participants' familiarity with the BNT objects varied depending on their culture and impacted their naming accuracy and overall scores on the test. Accordingly, the possibility of cultural biases should be considered when administering the BNT to the population of the KSA and the possibility of making changes so that the test better reflects the Arab culture as suggested.

The role of imageability in noun and verb acquisition in children with Down syndrome and their peers with typical development

Our main objective was to analyze the role of imageability in relation to the age of acquisition (AoA) of nouns and verbs in Spanish-speaking children with Down syndrome (DS) and their peers with typical development (TD). The AoA of nouns and verbs was determined using the MacArthur-Bates CDIs adapted to the profile of children with DS. The AoA was analyzed using a linear mixed-effect model, including factors of imageability, group, and word class, and controlling for word frequency and word length. This analysis showed that high imaginable and short words were acquired early. Children with DS acquired the words later than TD peers. An interaction between imageability and group indicated that the effect of imageability was greater in the DS group. We discuss this effect considering DS children's phonological memory difficulties. The overall results confirm the role that imageability and word length play in lexical acquisition, an effect that goes beyond word class.

Familiarity ratings for 24,325 simplified Chinese words

The present work collected familiarity norms for 20,275 two-character, 1231 three-character, and 2819 four-character simplified Chinese words from 1300 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. The familiarity of each word was rated on a 7-point scale by at least 21 participants. The results supported the reliability and validity of the present familiarity ratings, which is the first large familiarity database for Chinese in the field. These familiarity norms can be downloaded from the supplemental materials. Furthermore, the contribution of familiarity to Chinese lexical processing was investigated using the present familiarity ratings and previous data (lexical features and visual lexical decision), mainly from two major Chinese lexicon projects, MELD-SCH and CLP. Regression analysis suggests that familiarity explained a substantial percentage of the variance in lexical processing of both simplified and traditional Chinese words, over and above the effects of word frequency and other lexical features, including age of acquisition (AoA). Further analysis identified a significantly greater familiarity effect for lower-frequency words than that for higher-frequency words. Together, among the first, our findings support the important contribution of familiarity with Chinese words to lexical processing, especially for low-frequency words.

Consideration of culture in cognition: How we can enrich methodology and theory

In this paper, we argue that adopting an inclusive approach where diverse cultures are represented in research is of prime importance for cognitive psychology. The overrepresentation of participant samples and researchers from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) cultures limits the generalizability of findings and fails to capture potential sources of variability, impeding understanding of human cognition. In an analysis of articles in representative cognitive psychology journals over the five-year period of 2016-2020, we find that only approximately 7% of articles consider culture, broadly defined. Of these articles, a majority (83%) focus on language or bilingualism, with small numbers of articles considering other aspects of culture. We argue that methodology and theory developed in the last century of cognitive research not only can be leveraged, but will be enriched by greater diversity in both populations and researchers. Such advances pave the way to uncover cognitive processes that may be universal or systematically differ as a function of cultural variations, and the individual differences in relation to cultural variations. To make a case for broadening this scope, we characterize relevant cross-cultural research, sample classic cognitive research that is congruent with such an approach, and discuss compatibility between a cross-cultural perspective and the classic tenets of cognitive psychology. We make recommendations for large and small steps for the field to incorporate greater cultural representation in the study of cognition, while recognizing the challenges associated with these efforts and acknowledging that not every research question calls for a cross-cultural perspective.

A Standardized Set of 380 Pictures for Lebanese Arabic: Norms for Name Agreement, Conceptual Familiarity, Imageability, and Subjective Frequency

Research on language processing requires language-specific norms of pictorial and linguistic experimental stimuli across different psycholinguistic variables. Such normative data have not yet been collected for Lebanese Arabic (LA), an Arabic dialect. Arabic languages are characterized by diglossia: while modern standard Arabic is their common means of formal communication, Arabic dialects are the medium of oral communication within each community. This claims for specific dialectal norms. Thus, the main goal of the present study was to collect normative LA data for 380 pictures taken from Cykowicz, Friedman, Rothstein, and Snodgrass (The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A 50(3):560-585; including the 260 pictures of Snodgrass & Vanderwart in Journal of experimental psychology: Human learning and memory 6(2):174-215, 1980) using a sample of 248 native LA speakers. Norms are reported for name agreement, conceptual familiarity, imageability and subjective frequency, together with word length in number of letters and syllables. We compared the obtained norms with the normative data of other Arabic dialects (Levantine, Tunisian and Gulf Arabic) and with English, French and Spanish. Results showed the distinction of LA from the other Arabic dialects. This provides support of specific dialectal Arabic norms and will allow researchers to rigorously select the stimuli to investigate language processing in LA-speaking populations.

Probing Lexical Ambiguity: Word Vectors Encode Number and Relatedness of Senses

Lexical ambiguity-the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses-is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to semantics, in which a word's meaning is determined by its contexts, have led to successful research quantifying the degree of ambiguity, but these measures have not distinguished between the ambiguity of words with multiple related senses versus multiple unrelated meanings. In this work, we present the first assessment of whether distributional meaning representations can capture the ambiguity structure of a word, including both the number and relatedness of senses. On a very large sample of English words, we find that some, but not all, distributional semantic representations that we test exhibit detectable differences between sets of monosemes (unambiguous words; N = 964), polysemes (with multiple related senses; N = 4,096), and homonyms (with multiple unrelated senses; N = 355). Our findings begin to answer open questions from earlier work regarding whether distributional semantic representations of words, which successfully capture various semantic relationships, also reflect fine-grained aspects of meaning structure that influence human behavior. Our findings emphasize the importance of measuring whether proposed lexical representations capture such distinctions: In addition to standard benchmarks that test the similarity structure of distributional semantic models, we need to also consider whether they have cognitively plausible ambiguity structure.

The Moroccan Arabic verb and noun test for language mapping (MAVNT-LP) under nTMS and DES

To maximize tumor resection and minimize postoperative neurological sequelae, intraoperative Direct Electrical Stimulation (DES) coupled with preoperative Navigated Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (nTMS) is adopted as a more valid procedure when a tumor is located in or near language-positive cortical and subcortical brain areas/networks. To map language functions peri- and intraoperatively, naming tasks are usually administered given their sensitivity and practicality in mapping language networks and their association with positive postoperative outcomes. Linguistic protocols designed for stimulation under nTMS are relatively scarce, and non-existent in the Arabic language. The present study attempts to fill these gaps by presenting the processes of development, piloting, and standardization of the first (Moroccan) Arabic object and action naming protocol for use preoperatively under nTMS, and intraoperatively under DES. The MAVNT-LP was developed in accordance with both DES and nTMS time requirements and was balanced for relevant psycholinguistic as well as intrinsic factors. The test underwent piloting on a population of 10 Moroccan Arabic (MA)-speaking individuals and was validated on a population of 50 participants. The standardized version of the test consisted of 61 nouns and 61 verbs. The 122 items included in the test were named accurately by at least 80% of the participants and had a high naming agreement. Correlations between psycholinguistic factors and lexical retrieval are reported and discussed. The MAVNT-LP was found to be a valid instrument for use in a clinical setting either as a planning tool or as a protocol used to stimulate eloquent brain areas under awake brain surgery.

RealPic: Picture norms of real-world common items

Pictures are often used as stimuli in several fields, such as psychology and neuroscience. However, co-occurring image-related properties might impact their processing, emphasizing the importance of validating such materials to guarantee the quality of research and professional practices. This is particularly relevant for pictures of common items because of their wide applicability potential. Normative studies have already been conducted to create and validate such pictures, yet most of them focused on stimulus without naturalistic elements (e.g., line drawings). Norms for real-world pictures of common items are rare, and their normative examination does not always simultaneously assess affective, semantic and perceptive dimensions, namely in the Portuguese context. Real-world pictures constitute pictorial representations of the world with realistic details (e.g., natural color or position), thus improving their ecological validity and their suitability for empirical studies or intervention purposes. Consequently, the establishment of norms for real-world pictures is mandatory for exploring their ecological richness and to uncover their impact across several relevant dimensions. In this study, we established norms for 596 real-world pictures of common items (e.g., tomato, drum) selected from existing databases and distributed into 12 categories. The pictures were evaluated on nine dimensions by a Portuguese sample. The results present the norms by item, by dimension and their correlations as well as cross-cultural analyses. RealPic is a culturally based dataset that offers systematic and flexible standards and is suitable for selecting stimuli while controlling for confounding effects in empirical tasks and interventional applications.

A Systematic Review of Normative Studies Using Images of Common Objects

Common objects comprise living and non-living things people interact with in their daily-lives. Images depicting common objects are extensively used in different fields of research and intervention, such as linguistics, psychology, and education. Nevertheless, their adequate use requires the consideration of several factors (e.g., item-differences, cultural-context and confounding correlated variables), and careful validation procedures. The current study presents a systematic review of the available published norms for images of common objects. A systematic search using PRISMA guidelines indicated that despite their extensive use, the production of norms for such stimuli with adult populations is quite limited (N = 55), particularly for more ecological images, such as photos (N = 14). Among the several dimensions in which the items were assessed, the most commonly referred in our sample were familiarity, visual complexity and name agreement, illustrating some consistency across the reported dimensions while also indicating the limited examination of other potentially relevant dimensions for image processing. The lack of normative studies simultaneously examining affective, perceptive and semantic dimensions was also documented. The number of such normative studies has been increasing in the last years and published in relevant peer-reviewed journals. Moreover, their datasets and norms have been complying with current open science practices. Nevertheless, they are still scarcely cited and replicated in different linguistic and cultural contexts. The current study brings important theoretical contributions by characterizing images of common objects stimuli and their culturally-based norms while highlighting several important features that are likely to be relevant for future stimuli selection and evaluative procedures. The systematic scrutiny of these normative studies is likely to stimulate the production of new, robust and contextually-relevant normative datasets and to provide tools for enhancing the quality of future research and intervention.

The Relationship between Psycholinguistic Features of Religious Words and Core Dimensions of Religiosity: A Survey Study with Japanese Participants

Previous studies have reported that religious words and religiosity affect mental processes and behaviors. However, it is unclear what psycholinguistic features of religious words (e.g., familiarity, imageability, and emotional aspects) are associated with each dimension of personal religiosity (intellect, ideology, public practice, private practice, and experience). The purpose of this study was to examine whether and how the above-mentioned psycholinguistic features of religious words correlate with each of the core dimensions of religiosity. Japanese participants evaluated four psycholinguistic features of twelve religious words using a 5-point Semantic Differential scale for familiarity and imageability and a 9-point Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) scale for emotional valence and emotional arousal. The participants also rated their own religiosity using the Japanese version of the Centrality of Religiosity Scale (JCRS). The results of the study revealed that (1) the scales measuring the psycholinguistic features of religious words were statistically reliable; (2) the JCRS was reliable; (3) the familiarity, emotional valence, and emotional arousal of religious words and each mean dimensional score of the JCRS score correlated positively with each other; and (4) highly religious people had higher familiarity and higher emotional arousal to religious words than non-religious people, whereas highly religious people had higher emotional valence to religious words in comparison with non-religious and religious people. In addition, religious people had higher familiarity to religious words than non-religious people. Taken together, these findings suggest that psycholinguistic features of religious words contribute to the detection of religiosity.

IMABASE: A new set of 313 colourised line drawings standardised in French for name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, age-of-acquisition, and imageability

We provide normative data for a new set of 313 colourised line drawings. The drawings were standardised on name agreement (N = 60 participants), image agreement (N = 34), conceptual familiarity (N = 36), age of acquisition (N = 35), and imageability (N = 35). Objective visual complexity measures are given for the pictures, and objective word frequencies are provided for the modal names of the drawings. Reliability measures for the collected norms are very high. There are high levels of agreement between the names given by the participants and the drawings and comparative analyses indicate that the distribution of name agreement scores is very similar in both our own database and the MultiPic database (Duñabeitia et al., 2018). A novel "picture-choice task" used to assess name-image agreement (N = 30) reveals that the great majority of the IMABASE pictures that are also present in MultiPic are rated as providing better pictorial representations of the corresponding concepts. Finally, most of the correlations are comparable with those reported in other normative studies on colourised drawings. The whole set of pictures is freely available from https://leadserv.u-bourgogne.fr/~lead/imabase/ and the norms are available as Supplementary Material.

Normative values of the Brief International Cognitive Assessment for Multiple Sclerosis (BICAMS) in an Arab population: Corrected for age, sex and education

Background Cognitive impairment is common in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients with 43-70% of patients being affected. The international cognitive assessment for MS BICAMS is a new battery for cognitive assessment in MS patients. It was suggested in 2012 that international validation efforts be undertaken. Objective To utilize regression to provide normative values for the BICAMS while correcting for age, gender and education, as well as assess test-retest reliability, in an Arab population. Methods Healthy subjects were recruited from different areas in Dubai. Corrections for demographics were calculated using multiple linear regression. Test-retest reliability was assessed using the Pearson correlation coefficient. Results Two hundred eighty-one healthy subjects were enrolled (174 women, mean age 30±10.3 years, mean education 17.8±3.7 years). Test re-test results showed significant correlation between baseline and retest scores. Regression-based equations were derived for the BICAMS. Conclusion This large-scale validation study provides evidence to support the facilitation of international implementation of the BICAMS assessment by focusing on the Arab population. Next steps include validation efforts in an Arab MS patient population to further support the use of the BICAMS in day to day practice and for longitudinal patient assessment.

High electronic name agreement of 70 pictures in normative study of 5,290 Czechs for easy multicultural replication

The aim of this normative study was to verify recognition and name agreement of 70 black and white line pictures on a large Czech population sample using an electronic form. The set of pictures was selected based on previous research showing preliminary evidence of high name agreement with one word only. The pictures were arrayed into an electronic form that was distributed via the internet and filled in by 6,055 participants across the whole country. The group for final evaluation comprised of 5,290 respondents (age range 11-90 years, average ± SD: 53 ± 15 years, 77% of women, years of completed education: range 8-28 years, 15 ± 3 years) from all regions. The average name agreement for all pictures was 98%. Name agreement in the majority of pictures was not influenced by gender, age, and education. The most useful 14 pictures are entirely independent of all sociodemographic factors and include table, scissors, bell, ski, crown, chimney, glasses, steering wheel, heart, chain, ladder, horseshoe, bone, and alarm clock. The presented set of pictures named by one word only can be used for diagnostic or therapeutic purposes. The pictures and the electronic form are freely available for replication in other languages at our website www.abadeco.cz.

Visual and auditory perceptual strength norms for 3,596 French nouns and their relationship with other psycholinguistic variables

Perceptual experience plays a critical role in the conceptual representation of words. Higher levels of semantic variables such as imageability, concreteness, and sensory experience are generally associated with faster and more accurate word processing. Nevertheless, these variables tend to be assessed mostly on the basis of visual experience. This underestimates the potential contributions of other perceptual modalities. Accordingly, recent evidence has stressed the importance of providing modality-specific perceptual strength norms. In the present study, we developed French Canadian norms of visual and auditory perceptual strength (i.e., the modalities that have major impact on word processing) for 3,596 nouns. We then explored the relationship between these newly developed variables and other lexical, orthographic, and semantic variables. Finally, we demonstrated the contributions of visual and auditory perceptual strength ratings to visual word processing beyond those of other semantic variables related to perceptual experience (e.g., concreteness, imageability, and sensory experience ratings). The ratings developed in this study are a meaningful contribution toward the implementation of new studies that will shed further light on the interaction between linguistic, semantic, and perceptual systems.

Norms of conceptual familiarity for 3,596 French nouns and their contribution in lexical decision

In the last decade, research has shown that word processing is influenced by the lexical and semantic features of words. However, norms for a crucial semantic variable-that is, conceptual familiarity-have not been available for a sizeable French database. We thus developed French Canadian conceptual familiarity norms for 3,596 nouns. This enriches Desrochers and Thompson's (2009) database, in which subjective frequency and imageability values are already available for the same words. We collected online data from 313 Canadian French speakers. The full database of conceptual familiarity ratings is freely available at http://lingualab.ca/fr/projets/normes-de-familiarite-conceptuelle . We then demonstrated the utility of these new conceptual familiarity norms by assessing their contribution to lexical decision times. We conducted a stepwise regression model with conceptual familiarity in the last step. This allowed us to assess the independent contribution of conceptual familiarity beyond the contributions of other well-known psycholinguistic variables, such as frequency, imageability, and age of acquisition. The results showed that conceptual familiarity facilitated lexical decision latencies. In sum, these ratings will help researchers select French stimuli for experiments in which conceptual familiarity must be taken into account.

MorphoLex-FR: A derivational morphological database for 38,840 French words

Studies on morphological processing in French, as in other languages, have shown disparate results. We argue that a critical and long-overlooked factor that could underlie these diverging results is the methodological differences in the calculation of morphological variables across studies. To address the need for a common morphological database, we present MorphoLex-FR, a sizeable and freely available database with 12 variables for prefixes, roots, and suffixes for the 38,840 words of the French Lexicon Project. MorphoLex-FR constitutes a first step to render future studies addressing morphological processing in French comparable. The procedure we used for morphological segmentation and variable computation is effectively the same as that in MorphoLex, an English morphological database. This will allow for cross-linguistic comparisons of future studies in French and English that will contribute to our understanding of how morphologically complex words are processed. To validate these variables, we explored their influence on lexical decision latencies for morphologically complex nouns in a series of hierarchical regression models. The results indicated that only morphological variables related to the suffix explained lexical decision latencies. The frequency and family size of the suffix exerted facilitatory effects, whereas the percentage of more frequent words in the morphological family of the suffix was inhibitory. Our results are in line with previous studies conducted in French and in English. In conclusion, this database represents a valuable resource for studies on the effect of morphology in visual word processing in French.

Concreteness norms for 1,659 French words: Relationships with other psycholinguistic variables and word recognition times

Words that correspond to a potential sensory experience-concrete words-have long been found to possess a processing advantage over abstract words in various lexical tasks. We collected norms of concreteness for a set of 1,659 French words, together with other psycholinguistic norms that were not available for these words-context availability, emotional valence, and arousal-but which are important if we are to achieve a better understanding of the meaning of concreteness effects. We then investigated the relationships of concreteness with these newly collected variables, together with other psycholinguistic variables that were already available for this set of words (e.g., imageability, age of acquisition, and sensory experience ratings). Finally, thanks to the variety of psychological norms available for this set of words, we decided to test further the embodied account of concreteness effects in visual-word recognition, championed by Kousta, Vigliocco, Vinson, Andrews, and Del Campo (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140, 14-34, 2011). Similarly, we investigated the influences of concreteness in three word recognition tasks-lexical decision, progressive demasking, and word naming-using a multiple regression approach, based on the reaction times available in Chronolex (Ferrand, Brysbaert, Keuleers, New, Bonin, Méot, Pallier, Frontiers in Psychology, 2; 306, 2011). The norms can be downloaded as supplementary material provided with this article.

Name agreement and naming latencies for typed picture naming in aging adults

This baseline study aimed to create a coherent set of images that can be used to describe language decline found in healthy elderly and to compare this to the language change found in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. To this extend, a typed picture naming task was created, in which visual complexity, age-of-acquisition, frequency and name agreement were controlled for. 76 healthy elderly participated in the test; their data will be used in follow-up studies to compare with cognitively impaired patients. The entire typing process was logged with keystroke logging tools Inputlog and Scriptlog; the obtained results were analysed in light of the typing product (name agreement and object recognition) and the writing process (naming latencies and interkey latencies). Results showed that the latencies increased with age and that the older participants had longer latencies for images with a lower frequency and higher age-of-acquisition. Hence, our results indicate the need to take both the latencies and the typing product into consideration.

Thai Norms for Name, Image, and Category Agreement, Object Familiarity, Visual Complexity, Manipulability, and Age of Acquisition for 480 Color Photographic Objects

Normative databases containing psycholinguistic variables are commonly used to aid stimulus selection for investigations into language and other cognitive processes. Norms exist for many languages, but not for Thai. The aim of the present research, therefore, was to obtain Thai normative data for the BOSS, a set of 480 high resolution color photographic images of real objects (Brodeur et al. in PLoS ONE 5(5), 2010.  https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010773 ). Norms were provided by 584 Thai university students on eight dimensions: name agreement, object familiarity, visual complexity, category agreement, image agreement, two types of manipulability (graspability and mimeability), and age of acquisition. The results revealed comparatively similar levels of name agreement to Brodeur et al. especially when unfamiliar items were factored out. The pattern of intercorrelations among the Thai psycholinguistic norms was comparable to previous studies and our cross-linguistic correlations were robust for the same set of pictures in English and French. Conjointly, the findings extend the relevancy of the BOSS to Thailand, supporting this photographic resource for investigations of language and other cognitive processes in monolingual, multilingual, and brain-impaired populations.

Portuguese Norms of Name Agreement, Concept Familiarity, Subjective Frequency and Visual Complexity for 150 Colored and Tridimensional Pictures

Pictures are complex stimuli that require a careful control of several characteristics and attributes standardized for different languages. In this work we present for the first time European Portuguese (EP) norms for name agreement, concept familiarity, subjective frequency and visual complexity for a new set of 150 colored pictures. These pictures were selected to represent exemplars of the most used semantic categories in research and to depict objects which, though familiar to the participants, were rarely used in daily life, which makes them particularly prone to speech failures such as tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states. Norms were collected from 640 EP native speakers that rated each picture in the four variables through a web-survey procedure. Results showed, as expected, that a large number of pictures in the dataset elicited a TOT response, and additionally that the ratings obtained in each of the dimensions are in line with those observed in other pictorial datasets. Norms can be freely downloaded at https://www.psi.uminho.pt/en/Research/Psycholinguistics/Pages/Databases.aspx.