Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English word lemmas

Behav Res Methods. 2014 Sep;46(3):904-11. doi: 10.3758/s13428-013-0403-5.

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.

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Aged
  • Concept Formation
  • Emotions
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Internet
  • Language*
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Psycholinguistics / methods*
  • Semantics*
  • United States
  • White People
  • Young Adult