Spanish semantic feature production norms for 400 concrete concepts

Abstract

Semantic feature production norms provide many quantitative measures of different feature and concept variables that are necessary to solve some debates surrounding the nature of the organization, both normal and pathological, of semantic memory. Despite the current existence of norms for different languages, there are still no published norms in Spanish. This article presents a new set of norms collected from 810 participants for 400 living and nonliving concepts among Spanish speakers. These norms consist of empirical collections of features that participants used to describe the concepts. Four files were elaborated: a concept-feature file, a concept-concept matrix, a feature-feature matrix, and a significantly correlated features file. We expect that these norms will be useful for researchers in the fields of experimental psychology, neuropsychology, and psycholinguistics.

A cross-linguistic comparison of Spanish and English semantic norms: Looking at core features

“…More interesting, the present study found few linguistic as well as cultural differences worth mentioning. For instance, one of these differences in our study is evident in the concept "pavo" (turkey) from the Spanish norm (Vivas et al, 2017) that coincides in its higher value with the concept "peacock" from the English norm (McRae et al, 2005). The first cultural difference is evidenced by the fact that "turkey" is a typical everyday food in the United States, and a traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas dish.…”

“…The semantic production norms in English (McRae et al, 2005) and Spanish (Vivas et al, 2017) were elaborated on a basis of 540 and 400 concrete concepts, respectively, using an intersection between both norms of 219 concepts. For the generation of verbal descriptors and the verbal semantic field for the 219 concepts, the production frequency of features for each concept was considered.…”

“…This work performed a cross-linguistic comparison of Spanish (Vivas et al, 2017) and English (McRae et al, 2005) semantic feature production norms comprising 219 common concrete concepts. The geometric technique of vector comparison in the Euclidean n-dimensional space was used alongside the calculation of the network's degree of centrality.…”

“…Stimuli were collected from the English (McRae et al, 2005) and Spanish (Vivas et al, 2017) sets of semantic feature norms. The English norms comprised 540 concepts and the Spanish one 400.…”

“…Due to the growing interest in the study of the role of semantic features in the organization of concepts, numerous research groups of different countries and languages have analyzed and elaborated feature production norms (Buchanan, Holmes, Teasley, & Hutchinson, 2012;Buchanan, Valentine, & Maxwell, 2019;De Deyne et al, 2008;Devereux, Tyler, Geertzen, & Randall, 2014;Lenci, Baroni, Cazzolli, & Marotta, 2013;McRae, Cree, Seidenberg, & McNorgan, 2005;Moldovan, Ferré, Demestre, & Sánchez-Casas, 2015;Montefinese, Ambrosini, Fairfield, & Mammarella, 2014;Ruts et al, 2004;Stein & de Azevedo Gomes, 2009;Vinson & Vigliocco, 2008;Vivas et al, 2017;Zannino et al, 2006). Typically, in the collection of semantic features, participants are presented with a set of concepts and are asked to produce the features that they believe best describe these concepts, a task known as a feature-listing task.…”