Ratings of imageability, concreteness, specificity, familiarity and age of acquisition in Czech nouns and verbs: their mutual relations and dependencies
Abstract
The study aimed to collect a set of psycholinguistic norms for subjective properties of words, and describe the relations between these properties and the lexical decision times for the words. Sample and procedure.
The set of words included 63 nouns and 35 verbs. Two questionnaires were created that included these words.
One was an online questionnaire assessing the adult-rated age of acquisition (AoA). The main questionnaire was a paper questionnaire administered to the final-year high-school students (N=249, age 18-20).
The students always rated one of the following properties: concreteness, imageability,specificity,and familiarity. In addition to these ratings, the frequencies of the words in corpora of spoken and written Czech were used, and lexical decision latencies measured.
Hypotheses. One hypothesis was that the lexical decision times will be related to the word ratings: lower AoA, and higher imageability/concreteness/specificity/familiarity, should be related to faster decision times.
Statistical analyses. The data were evaluated using the Pearson correlation coefficient, the partial correlation coefficient, and linear regression.
Results. The data from Czech confirmed the findings from other languages: nouns show higher imageability than verbs, imageability and concreteness are highly correlated, familiarity is related to spoken frequency more closely than to written frequency.
Regression models showed that all subjective norms have statistically significant relation with the lexical decision times,above and beyond frequency and word length. Limitations.
The principal limitation for further generalizations is the small sample of words for which ratings were obtained.