Thai Norms for Name, Image, and Category Agreement, Object Familiarity, Visual Complexity, Manipulability, and Age of Acquisition for 480 Color Photographic Objects

Abstract

Normative databases containing psycholinguistic variables are commonly used to aid stimulus selection for investigations into language and other cognitive processes. Norms exist for many languages, but not for Thai. The aim of the present research, therefore, was to obtain Thai normative data for the BOSS, a set of 480 high resolution color photographic images of real objects (Brodeur et al. in PLoS ONE 5(5), 2010. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010773 ). Norms were provided by 584 Thai university students on eight dimensions: name agreement, object familiarity, visual complexity, category agreement, image agreement, two types of manipulability (graspability and mimeability), and age of acquisition. The results revealed comparatively similar levels of name agreement to Brodeur et al. especially when unfamiliar items were factored out. The pattern of intercorrelations among the Thai psycholinguistic norms was comparable to previous studies and our cross-linguistic correlations were robust for the same set of pictures in English and French. Conjointly, the findings extend the relevancy of the BOSS to Thailand, supporting this photographic resource for investigations of language and other cognitive processes in monolingual, multilingual, and brain-impaired populations.

Brazilian norms for the Bank of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS)

“…Interestingly, for the familiarity dimension, differences between living and non-living items were only significant in the English- and French-Canadian norms, wherein living items were significantly more familiar than non-living items [14,21]. Visual complexity, on the other hand, was significantly lower for living than for non-living items in all norms, a finding that is consistent with the idea that this dimension is unaffected by culture or language [26]. All norms showed greater modal name agreement and lower H value for living than for non-living items.…”

“…As can be seen in Table 1, the current mean familiarity and visual complexity are consistent with those of the English-Canadian [14] and French-Canadian [21] studies, even though the current mean familiarity is considerably greater than the Thai mean familiarity [26]. Therefore, the overall high familiarity found in the current norms suggest that most objects are highly familiar for Brazilians, despite the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic differences between Brazilians and the English-Canadian participants of the original BOSS norms.…”

“…Cross-linguistic and cross-country differences for the BOSS norms considering name agreement, H value, familiarity, and visual complexity were previously reported. That is, cross-linguistic comparisons (i.e., same country, different languages) were reported for French- versus English-Canadian individuals [21], and cross-country comparisons were reported for Thai versus French- and English-Canadian individuals [26]. Cross-country/linguistic comparisons between the current Brazilian norms and the English-Canadian, French-Canadian, and Thai norms are presented in Table 3.…”

“…Considering these limitations concerning the image sets currently available for Brazilian researchers, and the importance of such materials for research in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, in the current study we collected norms for name agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity for the version 1.0 of the BOSS set of images [14] from a sample of Brazilian individuals. We then examined these dimensions according to whether each item was living or non-living and compared the Brazilian norms with the English-Canadian [14], French-Canadian [21], and with the recently reported Thai norms [26]. We expected to find some consistency among the norms regarding the dimensions of visual complexity [26] but expected that such consistency would be lower for the remaining dimensions, since they may be more susceptible to culture than visual complexity.…”

“…We then examined these dimensions according to whether each item was living or non-living and compared the Brazilian norms with the English-Canadian [14], French-Canadian [21], and with the recently reported Thai norms [26]. We expected to find some consistency among the norms regarding the dimensions of visual complexity [26] but expected that such consistency would be lower for the remaining dimensions, since they may be more susceptible to culture than visual complexity. Considering the living/non-living domains, we expected a greater overall naming performance for living versus non-living items [16] and expected some consistency among the norms regarding the interaction of the living/non-living domains with the familiarity, H value, and name agreement dimensions.…”