title: The Calgary semantic decision project: concrete/abstract decision data for 10,000 English words.
abstract: Psycholinguistic research has been advanced by the development of word recognition megastudies. For instance, the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007) provides researchers with access to naming and lexical-decision latencies for over 40,000 words. In the present work, we extended the megastudy approach to a task that emphasizes semantic processing. Using a concrete/abstract semantic decision (i.e., does the word refer to something concrete or abstract?), we collected decision latencies and accuracy rates for 10,000 English words. The stimuli were concrete and abstract words selected from Brysbaert, Warriner, and Kuperman's (2013) comprehensive list of concreteness ratings. In total, 321 participants provided responses to 1,000 words each. Whereas semantic effects tend to be quite modest in naming and lexical decision studies, analyses of the concrete/abstract semantic decision responses show that a substantial proportion of variance can be explained by semantic variables. The item-level and trial-level data will be useful for other researchers interested in the semantic processing of concrete and abstract words.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta, T2N1N4, Canada. pexman@ucalgary.ca.
authors.forename: Penny M
authors.initials: PM
authors.lastname: Pexman
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta, T2N1N4, Canada.
authors.forename: Alison
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Heard
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta, T2N1N4, Canada.
authors.forename: Ellen
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Lloyd
authors.affiliation: National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore.
authors.forename: Melvin J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Yap
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D016208:Databases, Factual / Q000592:standards; D003657:Decision Making; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011578:Psycholinguistics / Q000592:standards*; D011930:Reaction Time; D012015:Reference Standards; D012660:Semantics; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Concreteness; Semantic decision task; Semantic processing; Word meaning