Psycholinguistic Norms

Definition

Psycholinguistic norms refer to word-level properties such as concreteness, familiarity, imageability, and meaningfulness.

Methodology

TAALES computes psycholinguistic scores by averaging normed ratings per word from psycholinguistic databases. Scores are calculated separately for all words (AW), content words (CW), and function words (FW), depending on the index.

Corpus used

  • MRC Psycholinguistic Database (Coltheart, 1981)
  • Brysbaert Concreteness Norms (Brysbaert et al., 2014)

Calculated indices

MRC

Familiarity

  • Indices:
    • MRC_Familiarity_AW
    • MRC_Familiarity_CW
    • MRC_Familiarity_FW

Concreteness

  • Indices:
    • MRC_Concreteness_AW
    • MRC_Concreteness_CW
    • MRC_Concreteness_FW

Imageability

  • Indices:
    • MRC_Imageability_AW
    • MRC_Imageability_CW
    • MRC_Imageability_FW

Meaningfulness

  • Indices:
    • MRC_Meaningfulness_AW
    • MRC_Meaningfulness_FW

Brysbaert concreteness norms

  • Indices:
    • Brysbaert_Concreteness_Combined_AW
    • Brysbaert_Concreteness_Combined_CW
    • Brysbaert_Concreteness_Combined_FW

References

  • Brysbaert, M., Warriner, A. B., & Kuperman, V. (2014). Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English word lemmas. Behavior research methods, 46, 904-911. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0403-5
  • Coltheart, M. (1981). The MRC psycholinguistic database. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A, 33(4), 497-505. https://doi.org/10.1080/14640748108400805