An Ecological Alternative to Snodgrass & Vanderwart: 360 High Quality Colour Images with Norms for Seven Psycholinguistic Variables

This work presents a new set of 360 high quality colour images belonging to 23 semantic subcategories. Two hundred and thirty-six Spanish speakers named the items and also provided data from seven relevant psycholinguistic variables: age of acquisition, familiarity, manipulability, name agreement, typicality and visual complexity. Furthermore, we also present lexical frequency data derived from Internet search hits. Apart from the high number of variables evaluated, knowing that it affects the processing of stimuli, this new set presents important advantages over other similar image corpi: (a) this corpus presents a broad number of subcategories and images; for example, this will permit researchers to select stimuli of appropriate difficulty as required, (e.g., to deal with problems derived from ceiling effects); (b) the fact of using coloured stimuli provides a more realistic, ecologically-valid, representation of real life objects. In sum, this set of stimuli provides a useful tool for research on visual object-and word- processing, both in neurological patients and in healthy controls

Getting a grip on sensorimotor effects in lexical-semantic processing

One of the strategies that researchers have used to investigate the role of sensorimotor information in lexical-semantic processing is to examine effects of words’ rated body-object interaction (BOI; the ease with which the human body can interact with a word’s referent). Processing tends to be facilitated for words with high BOI compared to words with low BOI, across a wide variety of tasks. Such effects have been referenced in debates over the nature of semantic representations, but their theoretical import has been limited by the fact that BOI is a fairly coarse measure of sensorimotor experience with words’ referents. In the present study we collected ratings for 621 words on seven semantic dimensions (graspability, ease of pantomime, number of actions, animacy, size, danger, and usefulness) in order to investigate which attributes are most strongly related to BOI ratings, and to lexical-semantic processing. BOI ratings were obtained from previous norming studies (Bennett, Burnett, Siakaluk, & Pexman, 2011; Tillotson, Siakaluk, & Pexman, 2008) and measures of lexical-semantic processing were obtained from previous behavioural megastudies involving the semantic categorization task (concrete/abstract decision; Pexman, Heard, Lloyd, & Yap, 2017) and the lexical decision task (Balota et al., 2007). Results showed that the motor dimension of graspability, ease of pantomime, and number of actions were all related to BOI and that these dimensions together explained more variance in semantic processing than did BOI ratings alone. These ratings will be useful for researchers who wish to study how different kinds of bodily interactions influence lexical-semantic processing and cognition