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Norms and reading times for acronyms in French

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Abstract

We collected subjective frequency, age-of-acquisition, and imageability norms for 319 acronyms from French adults. Objective printed frequency, bigram frequency, and lengths in letters, phonemes, and syllables, as well as orthographic neighbors, were computed. The time taken to read acronyms aloud was also recorded. Correlational analyses indicated that the relations between the psycholinguistic variables were similar to those usually found for common words (e.g., highly imageable acronyms were more frequent and learned earlier in life than less imageable acronyms), but were generally weaker in the former than in the latter. Linear mixed-model analyses performed on the reading latencies revealed that the main determinants were the voicing feature of initial phonemes, the type of pronunciation of the acronyms (ambiguous vs. unambiguous, typical vs. atypical characteristics), length (number of letters and number of syllables), together with bigram frequency, printed frequency, and imageability. Both objective frequency and imageability interacted reliably with the ambiguous typical and ambiguous atypical properties. Accuracy was predicted by the number of letters and by imageability factors: More errors occurred on longer than on shorter acronyms, and also more errors on less imageable than on more imageable acronyms. The theoretical and methodological implications of the findings for the understanding of acronym reading are discussed. The entire set of norms and the acronym reading times (and accuracy scores), together with the acronym definitions, are provided as supplemental materials.

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Notes

  1. We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to us.

  2. The same results were found when the quadratic term of imageability was removed from the equation.

  3. It is worthy of note, however, that the correlations are dependent on the types of words used in the corpora (e.g., monosyllabic vs. dissyllabic, or nouns only vs. nouns plus other grammatical categories).

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Author note

This work was supported by a grant from the Institut universitaire de France, given to the first author. The authors thank Mélanie Provost and Séverine Juget for their help in the collection of the data, and Gregory Francis, Cristina Izura, and one anonymous reviewer for their constructive comments on a previous version of the article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut universitaire de France, Dijon, France

    Patrick Bonin

  2. LEAD-CNRS, University of Bourgogne, Dijon, France

    Patrick Bonin, Séverine Millotte & Aurélia Bugaiska

  3. LAPSCO-CNRS, University Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, France

    Alain Méot

  4. LEAD-CNRS (UMR 5022), University of Bourgogne, Pôle AAFE, Esplanade Erasme, BP 26513, 21065, Dijon Cedex, France

    Patrick Bonin

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  1. Patrick Bonin
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Correspondence to Patrick Bonin.

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Bonin, P., Méot, A., Millotte, S. et al. Norms and reading times for acronyms in French. Behav Res 47, 251–267 (2015). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-014-0466-y

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