Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas

Brysbaert, Marc; Mandera, Paweł; McCormick, Samantha F.; Keuleers, Emmanuel

doi:10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9

Cited by 170 publications

(221 citation statements)

References 46 publications

(42 reference statements)

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“…LDT latencies were standardized as z-scores (these minimize the influence of a participant's overall processing speed and variability; Faust, Balota, Spieler, & Ferraro, 1999), and all predictor variables were meancentered. The lexical variables letter length and letter length squared (length 2 ; New, Ferrand, Pallier, & Brysbaert, 2006), word frequency, word prevalence (Brysbaert, Mandera, McCormick, & Keuleers, 2018), and OLD were entered in Step 1, and the semantic variables were entered in Step 2. These semantic variables included age of acquisition, concreteness, BOI and, in light of the nonlinear BOI relationships depicted in Fig.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying sensorimotor experience: Body–object interaction ratings for more than 9,000 English words

et al. 2018

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Ratings of body-object interaction (BOI) measure the ease with which the human body can interact with a word's referent. Researchers have studied the effects of BOI in order to investigate the relationships between sensorimotor and cognitive processes. Such efforts could be improved, however, by the availability of more extensive BOI norms. In the present work, we collected BOI ratings for over 9,000 words. These new norms show good reliability and validity and have extensive overlap with the words used both in other lexical and semantic norms and in the available behavioral megastudies (e.g., the English ). In analyses using the new BOI norms, we found that high-BOI words tended to be more concrete, more graspable, and more strongly associated with sensory, haptic, and visual experience than are low-BOI words. When we used the new norms to predict response latencies and accuracy data from the behavioral megastudies, we found that BOI was a stronger predictor of responses in the semantic decision task than in the lexical decision task. These findings are consistent with a dynamic, multidimensional account of lexical semantics. The norms described here should be useful for future research examining the effects of sensorimotor experience on performance in tasks involving word stimuli.Keywords Body-object interaction . Lexical decision task . Semantic decision task . Sensorimotor processes . Word ratings . Word recognition In recent years, a great deal of research has explored the relationships between cognition and sensorimotor processing. This work has addressed important questions about how we learn, represent, and retrieve information about the world, and it has examined the extent to which cognition is grounded in our sensorimotor systems. Of particular relevance to the present work are studies that have investigated the role of sensorimotor information in language and cognitive processing by examining the effects of body-object interaction (BOI;

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying sensorimotor experience: Body–object interaction ratings for more than 9,000 English words

et al. 2018

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“…Our aim was to choose to-be-learned target words which would be unfamiliar to our participants at the start of the experiment. Forty-two rare English words (13 nouns, 17 adjectives, and 12 verbs) were selected from norms provided by Brysbaert, Mandera, McCormick, and Keuleers (2018) as being low prevalence words, where prevalence is derived from the percentage of people who know the word (M = À0.02; Range = À0.34 to 0.45) (see Keuleers, Stevens, Mandera, & Brysbaert, 2015). Negative prevalence values indicate that words are not known by the majority of people, making them ideal stimuli for word learning experiments.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning Words Via Reading: Contextual Diversity, Spacing, and Retrieval Effects in Adults

Pagán

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2019

Cognitive Science

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We examined whether variations in contextual diversity, spacing, and retrieval practice influenced how well adults learned new words from reading experience. Eye movements were recorded as adults read novel words embedded in sentences. In the learning phase, unfamiliar words were presented either in the same sentence repeated four times (same context) or in four different sentences (diverse context). Spacing was manipulated by presenting the sentences under distributed or non‐distributed practice. After learning, half of the participants were asked to retrieve the new words, and half had an extra exposure to the new words. Although words experienced in diverse contexts were acquired more slowly during learning, they enjoyed a greater benefit of learning at immediate posttest. Distributed practice also slowed learning, but no benefit was observed at posttest. Although participants who had an extra exposure showed the greatest learning benefit overall, learning also benefited from retrieval opportunity, when words were experienced in diverse contexts. These findings demonstrate that variation in the content and structure of the learning environment impacts on word learning via reading.

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“…Thereby, words like "banana" are rated as relatively concrete while words like "idea" are rated as relatively abstract (Brysbaert et al, 2014). Empirical research has shown that relatively concrete words are more easily processed than abstract words in a variety of tasks, including word recognition (e.g., Strain, Patterson, & Seidenberg, 1995; but see Brysbaert, Mandera, McCormick, &Keuleers, 2018, andBrysbaert, Stevens, Mandera, &Keuleers, 2016, for contrasting findings), memory tasks (e.g., Jefferies, Frankish, & Lambon Ralph, 2006), comprehension tasks (e.g., Kounios & Holcomb, 1994), and production tasks (e.g., Wiemer-Hastings & Xu, 2005).…”

Section: Concreteness and Metaphoricitymentioning

confidence: 99%

How Polysemy Affects Concreteness Ratings: The Case of Metaphor

et al. 2019

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Concreteness ratings are frequently used in a variety of disciplines to operationalize differences between concrete and abstract words and concepts. However, most ratings studies present items in isolation, thereby overlooking the potential polysemy of words. Consequently, ratings for polysemous words may be conflated, causing a threat to the validity of concreteness‐ratings studies. This is particularly relevant to metaphorical words, which typically describe something abstract in terms of something more concrete. To investigate whether perceived concreteness ratings differ for metaphorical versus non‐metaphorical word meanings, we obtained concreteness ratings for 96 English nouns from 230 participants. Results show that nouns are perceived as less concrete when a metaphorical (versus non‐metaphorical) meaning is triggered. We thus recommend taking metaphoricity into account in future concreteness‐ratings studies to further improve the quality and reliability of such studies, as well as the consistency of the empirical studies that rely on these ratings.

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Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas

Cited by 170 publications

References 46 publications

Quantifying sensorimotor experience: Body–object interaction ratings for more than 9,000 English words

Quantifying sensorimotor experience: Body–object interaction ratings for more than 9,000 English words

Learning Words Via Reading: Contextual Diversity, Spacing, and Retrieval Effects in Adults

How Polysemy Affects Concreteness Ratings: The Case of Metaphor

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