Imagery, concreteness, age-of-acquisition, familiarity, and meaningfulness values for 205 five-letter words having single-solution anagrams

Abstract

Solution-word imagery appears to affect difficulty of anagram solving. To assist research in this area, we present imagery, concreteness, age-of-acquisition, familiarity, and meaningfulness values for 205 five-letter words known to form single-solution anagrams. None of the words have repeated letters. Intergroup reliabilities were satisfactory on all attributes. Significant correlations were found with previous word lists and the intercorrelations between dimensions matched previous findings.Recent studies have found that high-solution word imagery facilitates anagram solving (Dewing & Hetherington, 1974;Jablonski & Mueller, 1972; Stratton, Jacobus, & Leonard, 1975). However, word imagery is correlated with other potentially important attributes, notably concreteness, meaningfulness, familiarity, and age-of-acquisition (Paivio, Yuille, & Madigan, 1968; Stratton, Jacobus, & Brinley, 1975). Analysis of the effects of such word attributes on anagram solving has been hampered by the lack of appropriate norms for a sufficiently extensive set of suitable words. The Paivio et a1. list of imagery, concreteness, meaningfulness, and frequency values is not ideal for anagram research because of the variation in word lengths and the presence of letter repetition within words on the list. Stratton, Jacobus, and Brinley (I975) have provided a partial remedy with their list of imagery, familiarity, meaningfulness, and age-ofacquisition values for 543 words of which 72 are fiveletter and 471 are six-letter. The list is clearly useful for six-letter words, but less so for five-letter words. The present study gathered imagery, concreteness, age-of-acquisition, familiarity, and meaningfulness values on 205 words taken from Olson and Schwartz's (I967) list of single-solution five-letter anagrams, and so provides a further stock of rated words to supplement those already available. The list may be useful in studies of word perception, learning, and memory, as well as in anagram research. METHOD SubjectsThe subjects were first-year student volunteers attending Aberdeen University. Imagery ratings were given by 50 subjects. Concreteness, age-of-acquisition, and familiarity ratings were given by three separate groups of 40 subjects each. The rating Requests for reprints should be sent to K. J. Gilhooly, Department of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB9 2UB, Scotland. 12 groups were equally divided between males and females. A total of 257 subjects were involved in the meaningfulness measuring procedure and each word's score was based on data from between 20 to 30 subjects. WordsThe 205 five-letter words were selected from the Olson and Schwartz (1967) list of single-solution words. The words selected were not plurals, were not proper names, could be used as nouns, and were judged to be reasonably familiar. None of the words selected had repeated letters. ProcedureFor the imagery, age-of-acquisition, concreteness, and familiarity ratings, the following procedure was used.The words were printed in random order in columns ...

Word attributes and lateralization revisited: Implications for dual coding and discrete versus continuous processing

“…Such analyses were necessary to examine the effects of rated familiarity on overall word recognition and on asymmetry, since familiarity was not varied orthogonally with respect to the other word attributes. With respect to overall recognition, rated familiarity (Gilhooly & Hay, 1977) correlated highly to percent correct across stimuli, with the effects of imageability and concreteness partialled out (r = +.74, p < .001). Imageability correlated moderately to percent correct with familiarity and concreteness partialled out (r == +.32, p = .08), as did Recall.…”

“…CRUSH, FLIRT, HORDE, INDEX, PIVOT, TOKEN, VIRUS), (2) high-irnageability, low-eoncreteness words (FAIRY, FIGHT, FLASH, GNOME, GROUP, LIGHT, WATCH, WITCH), (3) low-imageability, high-concreteness words (BLOCK, BRINE, CHIMP, DIVOT, GRANT, MIDGE, OPIUM, WIDTH), and (4) high-imageability, high-eoncreteness words (CLOWN, DRUNK, HOUND, LUNCH, RANCH, SCOUT, UNCLE, YOUTH). Means and standard deviations for imageability and concreteness, calculated for each set using the ratings of Gilhooly and Hay (1977), were reported in an earlier study (Boles, 1983a).…”

Dissociated imageability, concreteness, and familiarity in lateralized word recognition

“…One is that, al-. though empirically imageability and concreteness are highly correlated (Gilhooly & Hay, 1977;Paivio et al, 1968), logically speaking, these dimensions are separable. Indeed, Paivio et al acknowledged the possibility of a dissociation by ratings: For example, "anger" is much higher in imageability than in concreteness, whereas the opposite is true for "antitoxin."…”

“…The rationale is that the observed high correlation of concreteness and imageability requires special attention to be given to their dissociation, whereas the modest correlations of familiarity to both (Gilhooly & Hay, 1977) makes unnecessary any special effort to isolate its effects. As will be seen, partial correlation is adequate assessment in this instance, producing .…”

LEXIN: A lexical database from Spanish kindergarten and first-grade readers

“…Age of acquisition has been estimated using subjective methods, such as adult subjective judgments (e.g., Carroll & White, 1973;Gilhooly & Hay, 1977;Gilhooly & Logie, 1980;Lyons, Teer, & Rubenstein, 1978;Rubin, 1980). However, objective measures, such as objective records of oral production in children, are more accurate (for objective measures in Spanish and English, respectively, see, e.g., Álvarez & Cuetos, 2007, and Morrison, Chappell, Finally, although the majority of the words had an entry in the RAE dictionary, some nonsense words were also included, as were misspellings that did not meet this condition.…”