Age of acquisition and imageability norms for base and morphologically complex words in English and in Spanish

Abstract

The extent to which processing words involves breaking them down into smaller units or morphemes or is the result of an interactive activation of other units, such as meanings, letters, and sounds (e.g., dis-agree-ment vs. disagreement), is currently under debate. Disentangling morphology from phonology and semantics is often a methodological challenge, because orthogonal manipulations are difficult to achieve (e.g., semantically unrelated words are often phonologically related: casual-casualty and, vice versa, sign-signal). The present norms provide a morphological classification of 3,263 suffixed derived words from two widely spoken languages: English (2,204 words) and Spanish (1,059 words). Morphologically complex words were sorted into four categories according to the nature of their relationship with the base word: phonologically transparent (friend-friendly), phonologically opaque (child-children), semantically transparent (habit-habitual), and semantically opaque (event-eventual). In addition, ratings were gathered for age of acquisition, imageability, and semantic distance (i.e., the extent to which the meaning of the complex derived form could be drawn from the meaning of its base constituents). The norms were completed by adding values for word frequency; word length in number of phonemes, letters, and syllables; lexical similarity, as measured by the number of neighbors; and morphological family size. A series of comparative analyses from the collated ratings for the base and derived words were also carried out. The results are discussed in relation to recent findings.Keywords Age of acquisition . Morphology . Phonology . Semantics . English . SpanishThe phonological, orthographic, morphological, and semantic characteristics of words are central elements in word processing research. This is because finding out how the mind interacts with the structures of language (i.e., its sounds, its letters, its morphemes, and the meaning of its words) has proved to be a successful method of understanding the cognitive basis of language production and comprehension (Brysbaert, Van Wijnendaele, & De Deyne, 2000;Cattell, 1886;Davies, Barbón, & Cuetos, 2013;Duñabeitia, Laka, Perea, & Carreiras, 2009;Frederiksen & Kroll, 1976;Izura, Hernández-Muñoz, & Ellis, 2005;Lavidor & Ellis, 2002;Levelt, 1989;Macizo & Bajo, 2006;Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Waksler, & Older, 1994;Pérez, 2007).Morphology, in particular, refers to the compositional structure that meaning has within the words in a language. Thus, words are often composed of smaller meaningful units called morphemes (e.g., home-work, penni-less, review-ed). Morphemes can both stand alone as monomorphemic words (e.g., truth) and be bonded to other morphemes as part of polymorphemic words (e.g., -ful in truthful). Morphologically complex words consist of a core morpheme, called root, base, or stem, and one or several add-on morphemes called affixes. In languages such as English and Spanish, affixes can be placed either at the beginning of the word (e.g., fore-in for...

The Body as Evidence for the Nature of Language

“…This means that sign languages share with spoken languages the design feature named “duality of patterning” by Hockett (1960) ; called ‘double articulation’ by Martinet (1960) : words in both modalities are comprised of both meaningless (phonological) and meaningful levels of structure. Stokoe’s non-trivial claim has been further investigated, corroborated, and refined by other researchers (e.g., Liddell and Johnson, 1986 ; Sandler, 1989 , 2012b , 2017 ; van der Hulst, 1993 ; Brentari, 1998 ). The handshape, location, and movement units behave like meaningless phonological elements in the sense that their combination is constrained by their form, and they are permuted by typical phonological processes such as assimilation and deletion, which are also oblivious to meaning, targeting and influencing articulatory properties of the elements.…”

The Glasgow Norms: Ratings of 5,500 words on nine scales

“…Correlations with a large effect ( r > .5, see Cohen, 1988) are printed in bold. References for the 18 norms are as follows: 1 = Bradley and Lang (1999); 2 = Warriner et al (2013); 3 = Brysbaert et al (2014); 4 = Cortese and Fugett (2004); 5 = Schock, Cortese, and Khanna (2012); 6 = Paivio et al (1968); 7 = Gilhooly and Logie (1980a); 8 = Gilhooly and Logie (1980b); 9 = Stadthagen-Gonzalez and Davis (2006); 10 = Juhasz et al (2015); 11 = Clark and Paivio (2004); 12 = Bird et al (2001); 13 = Davies et al (2016); 14 = Cortese and Khanna (2008); 15 = Schock, Cortese, et al (2012); 16 = Kuperman et al (2012); 17 = Khanna and Cortese (2011); and 18 = Crawford et al (2004) AROU arousal; VAL valence; DOM dominance; CNC concreteness; IMAG imageability; FAM familiarity; AOA age of acquisition; SIZE semantic size; GEND gender association…”

MorphoLex: A derivational morphological database for 70,000 English words

“…Studies that provide norms for this type of variables are timeconsuming endeavours and thus are usually based on smaller scale databases. For example, in a recent study, Davies, Izura, Socas, and Dominguez (2016) collected age of acquisition, imageability and semantic distance norms for 2,204 English words. Collecting these types of norms for thẽ 70,000 words of the complete ELP is beyond the scope of the present database.…”