Spanish norms for affective and lexico-semantic variables for 1,400 words

Abstract

Studies of semantic variables (e.g., concreteness) and affective variables (i.e., valence and arousal) have traditionally tended to run in different directions. However, in recent years there has been growing interest in studying the relationship, as well as the potential overlaps, between the two. This article describes a database that provides subjective ratings for 1,400 Spanish words for valence, arousal, concreteness, imageability, context availability, and familiarity. Data were collected online through a process involving 826 university students. The results showed a high interrater reliability for all of the variables examined, as well as high correlations between our affective and semantic values and norms currently available in other Spanish databases. Regarding the affective variables, the typical quadratic correlation between valence and arousal ratings was obtained. Likewise, significant correlations were found between the lexico-semantic variables. Importantly, we obtained moderate negative correlations between emotionality and both concreteness and imageability. This is in line with the claim that abstract words have more affective associations than concrete ones (Kousta, Vigliocco, Vinson, Andrews, & Del Campo, 2011). The present Spanish database is suitable for experimental research into the effects of both affective properties and lexico-semantic variables on word processing and memory.

Is pupillary response a reliable index of word recognition? Evidence from a delayed lexical decision task

“…Word frequency occurrences per million, log frequency, lemma frequency, log lemma frequency, old20, number of neighbors, number of higher-frequency neighbors, bigram frequency, trigram frequency, contextual diversity, and log contextual diversity were obtained from the EsPal subtitles corpus (Duchon, Perea, Sebastián, Martí, & Carreiras, 2013). On the other hand, the familiarity, concreteness, imageability, context availability, arousal, and emotional valence ratings were taken from Guasch, Ferré, and Fraga (2016), and the age-of-acquisition values were obtained from the database of Alonso, Fernandez, and Díez (2014). Full details of the experimental items are shown in Table 1.…”

Moved by words: Affective ratings for a set of 2,266 Spanish words in five discrete emotion categories

“…The criterion for selecting the words was quite straight forward: we aimed at collecting discrete-emotion ratings of words already rated from a dimensional perspective. Therefore, we focused on the Spanish adaptation of the ANEW (Redondo et al, 2007), containing 1,034 words; on the corpus of Ferré et al (2012), including ratings for 380 words grouped by the semantic categories of animals, objects and people; and on the norms from Guasch et al (2015), with ratings for 1,400 words. After excluding repeated words, the sum of the three datasets was of 2,419 different words.…”

“…Table 1 shows a summary of the database, with descriptive statistics for each of the five discrete emotions, as well as for the dimensional ratings of valence and arousal and other relevant psycholinguistic indices taken from other databases. The data for valence and arousal were taken from Ferré et al (2012), Guasch et al (2015), and Redondo et al (2007). The values for these dimensions ranged from 1 to 9.…”

“…However, as researchers have tried to control for more relevant variables, it has become apparent that larger stimulus sets are needed. To that end, other norm lists have been published in different languages, including English (Warriner, Kuperman, & Brysbaert, 2013), German (Võ, Jacobs, & Conrad, 2006;Võ et al, 2009), French (Monnier & Syssau, 2014), Finnish (Eilola & Havelka, 2010), Dutch (Moors et al, 2013), and Spanish (Ferré, Guasch, Moldovan, & Sánchez-Casas, 2012;Guasch, Ferré, & Fraga, 2015;Hinojosa et al, 2016;Stadthagen-González, Imbault, Pérez Sánchez, & Brysbaert, 2016).…”

“…This will be the largest corpus to date using a discreteemotion approach. We aimed at collecting discrete-emotion ratings of words already rated from a dimensional perspective in three affective norms published in Spanish: The Spanish adaptation of the ANEW (Redondo et al, 2007) and the corpora of Ferré et al (2012) and Guasch et al (2015). Therefore, the new data concerning the characterization of these words in discrete emotion categories will complement their valence and arousal data.…”