Body—object interaction ratings for 1,618 monosyllabic nouns

Abstract

The importance of sensorimotor interactions with the environment to the development and structure of cognitive processes is now being taken seriously by an increasing number of cognitive scientists. An embodied cognition approach to the study of cognitive processing has been adopted by researchers examining such varied abilities as cognitive and motor development, mental imagery, memory, reasoning and problem solving, linguistic processing, metaphor processing, and concept formation (Clark, 1997;Gibbs, 2006;Glenberg, 1997;Lakoff & Johnson, 1999;Pecher & Zwaan, 2005;Wilson, 2002).In the research area of visual word recognition, it could be proposed that imageability effects (i.e., words with referents that can be easily sensed, such as peach, are recognized more rapidly and/or more accurately than words with referents that cannot be easily sensed, such as fraud) (e.g., Cortese, Simpson, & Woolsey, 1997;Strain, Patterson, & Seidenberg, 1995) are best understood from an embodied cognitive perspective. As a result of repeated sensory experience with certain objects or events, words that refer to these objects or events develop richer linguistic representations than do words that refer to objects or events with which humans have less sensory experience. According to an embodied cognitive perspective, an important component of the conceptual understanding of easily imageable words is the set of sensory representations that may be activated when linguistic processing occurs, resulting in faster and more accurate responses to these words in visual word recognition tasks.Barsalou and colleagues recently developed an embodied framework that they described as perceptual symbol systems theory (Barsalou, 1999(Barsalou, , 2003a(Barsalou, , 2003bBarsalou, Simmons, Barbey, & Wilson, 2003). According to this theory, many different modalities are involved in the acquisition and processing of conceptual knowledge. In addition to systems that have been well studied in cognitive psychology, such as cognitive systems (e.g., attention and language processing) and sensory systems (e.g., vision and olfaction), the theory suggests that less studied systems, such as motor, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive systems (e.g., grasping, manual manipulation, and internal feedback from muscles and joints) and emotional systems (e.g., fear and pleasure), are fundamental to concept formation and processing. Although knowledge acquired through these individual systems is at first processed in modalityspecific memory systems, it is eventually fed into hierarchical convergence areas where integration of the separate forms of information takes place (see also Damasio, 1989;Edelman & Tononi, 2000;Kandel, 2006;LeDoux, 2001). Accessing conceptual knowledge involves partial activation or simulation of the varied systems that were involved in the original encoding of the object or event. According to this perspective, sensory and motor knowledge gained via bodily experience with the environment is an important part of what is learned about concepts, and it is...

Sensory experience ratings for over 5,000 mono- and disyllabic words

“…The correlation between SERs and imageability is higher in the combined data set (r 0 .586) than is reported in Juhasz et al (2011) for only monosyllabic words. The size of the correlation is similar to that reported between AoA and imageability (r 0 -.586) for the words presented in the Gilhooly and Logie (1980) norms (as calculated by Zevin & Seidenberg, 2002), as well as between BOI and imageability for 1,618 monosyllabic nouns (r 0 .67; Tillotson, Siakaluk, & Pexman, 2008). These correlations are smaller than those reported for different imageability norms (all of which have rs>.80; see Fugett, 2004, andSchock et al, 2012).…”

Emotion and language: Valence and arousal affect word recognition.

“…We therefore examined the correlations of valence and arousal with a battery of semantic measures, and we tested whether these emotional factors explained any unique variance in word recognition times after statistically accounting for those semantic variables. For this analysis we identified a set of 1083 monosyllabic words for which all of the following measures were available: valence and arousal ratings (Warriner et al, 2013), SUBTLEX frequency of occurrence (Brysbaert & New, 2009), age-of-acquisition ratings (Kuperman et al, 2012), imageability ratings (Cortese & Fugett, 2004; Schock et al, 2012), sensory experience ratings (Juhasz, Yap, Dicke, Taylor, & Gullick, 2011; Juhasz & Yap, 2013), body-object interaction ratings (Tillotson, Siakaluk, & Pexman, 2008), semantic diversity measures (Hoffman, Ralph, & Rogers, 2012; see also Jones, Johns, & Recchia, 2012) and the word's number of senses from Wordnet (Miller, 1995). …”

Determinants of naming latencies, object comprehension times, and new norms for the Russian standardized set of the colorized version of the Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures

“…The reliabilities of the norms are high and nearly identical. Table 2 shows the correlation coefficients between the present norms and those obtained for (1) subjective frequency in Chinese (Liu et al, 2011), in American English (Balota et al, 2001), and in French (Bonin, Méot, et al, 2003); (2) image variability in Chinese (Liu et al, 2011), in French (Alario & Ferrand, 1999), and in Spanish (Sanfeliu & Fernandez, 1996); and (3) BOI for Canadian English (Tillotson, Siakaluk, & Pexman, 2008). Given that these norms were all developed for different purposes, they were not computed using the same items.…”