Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English word lemmas

Behavior Research Methods volume 46, pages904–911(2014)Cite this article

Abstract

Concreteness ratings are presented for 37,058 English words and 2,896 two-word expressions (such as zebra crossing and zoom in), obtained from over 4,000 participants by means of a norming study using Internet crowdsourcing for data collection. Although the instructions stressed that the assessment of word concreteness would be based on experiences involving all senses and motor responses, a comparison with the existing concreteness norms indicates that participants, as before, largely focused on visual and haptic experiences. The reported data set is a subset of a comprehensive list of English lemmas and contains all lemmas known by at least 85 % of the raters. It can be used in future research as a reference list of generally known English lemmas.

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. 1.

    Indeed, M.B. would appreciate receiving suggestions of missing words that should have been included.

  2. 2.

    We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing us to this literature.

  3. 3.

    Arguably because people hear about myths.

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Author information

Affiliations

  1. Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan 2, 9000, Gent, Belgium

    Marc Brysbaert

  2. McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada

    Amy Beth Warriner & Victor Kuperman

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  1. Marc Brysbaert
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  2. Amy Beth Warriner
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  3. Victor Kuperman
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Correspondence to Marc Brysbaert.

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Brysbaert, M., Warriner, A.B. & Kuperman, V. Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English word lemmas. Behav Res 46, 904–911 (2014). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0403-5

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Keywords

  • Concreteness
  • Ratings
  • Crowdsourcing
  • Word recognition