Imageability and distributional typicality measures of nouns and verbs in contemporary English.
Dissociations between noun and verb processing are not uncommon after brain injury; yet, precise psycholinguistic comparisons of nouns and verbs are hampered by the underrepresentation of verbs in published semantic word norms and by the absence of contemporary estimates for part-of-speech usage. We report herein imageability ratings and rating response times (RTs) for 1,197 words previously categorized as pure nouns, pure verbs, or words of balanced noun-verb usage on the basis of the Francis and Kucera (1982) norms. Nouns and verbs differed in rated imageability, and there was a stronger correspondence between imageability rating and RT for nouns than for verbs. For all word types, the image-rating-RT function implied that subjects employed an image generation process to assign ratings. We also report a new measure of noun-verb typicality that used the Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL; Lund & Burgess, 1996) context vectors (derived from a large sample of Usenet text) to compute the mean context distance between each word and all of the pure nouns and pure verbs. For a subset of the items, the resulting HAL noun-verb difference score was compared with part-of-speech usage in a representative sample of the Usenet corpus. It is concluded that this score can be used to estimate the extent to which a given word occurs in typical noun or verb sentence contexts in informal contemporary English discourse. The item statistics given in Appendix B will enable experimenters to select representative examples of nouns and verbs or to compare typical with atypical nouns (or verbs), while holding constant or covarying rated imageability.
Chiarello
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C
Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside 92521, USA. christine.chiarello@ucr.edu
Shears
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C
Lund
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K
D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D013060:Speech; D014936:Word Association Tests