Concreteness norms for 1,659 French words: Relationships with other psycholinguistic variables and word recognition times

Abstract

Words that correspond to a potential sensory experience-concrete words-have long been found to possess a processing advantage over abstract words in various lexical tasks. We collected norms of concreteness for a set of 1,659 French words, together with other psycholinguistic norms that were not available for these words-context availability, emotional valence, and arousal-but which are important if we are to achieve a better understanding of the meaning of concreteness effects. We then investigated the relationships of concreteness with these newly collected variables, together with other psycholinguistic variables that were already available for this set of words (e.g., imageability, age of acquisition, and sensory experience ratings). Finally, thanks to the variety of psychological norms available for this set of words, we decided to test further the embodied account of concreteness effects in visual-word recognition, championed by Kousta, Vigliocco, Vinson, Andrews, and Del Campo (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140, 14-34, 2011). Similarly, we investigated the influences of concreteness in three word recognition tasks-lexical decision, progressive demasking, and word naming-using a multiple regression approach, based on the reaction times available in Chronolex (Ferrand, Brysbaert, Keuleers, New, Bonin, Méot, Pallier, Frontiers in Psychology, 2; 306, 2011). The norms can be downloaded as supplementary material provided with this article.

Visual and auditory perceptual strength norms for 3,596 French nouns and their relationship with other psycholinguistic variables

“…Unfortunately, norms for the semantic variables were not always available for all the words included in the present study. Ratings of concreteness for 542 words were taken from Bonin et al (2018). Imageability ratings for 3,596 words were taken from Desrochers and Thompson (2009).…”

“…Concreteness is defined as the degree to which words refer to objects, individuals, places, or things that can be experienced with our senses (Paivio, Yuille, & Madigan, 1968). Concreteness rating norms are based on the degree to which certain words refer to tangible objects, materials, or people that can be easily perceived by our senses (Bonin, Méot, & Bugaiska, 2018). A longstanding literature has pointed out that concrete concepts are processed more quickly and accurately than abstract concepts (Allen & Hulme, 2006;Binder, Westbury, McKiernan, Possing, & Medler, 2005;Fliessbach, Weis, Klaver, Elger, & Weber, 2006;Paivio, Yuille, & Smythe, 1966;Romani, McAlpine, & Martin, 2008).…”

“It is alive!” Evidence for animacy effects in semantic categorization and lexical decision

“…A brief definition of what is meant by concrete and abstract was provided at the beginning of the experiment. More precisely, a concrete word was defined as a word whose concept refers to perceptible entities such as objects, persons, or places (Bonin et al, 2018). Computers running the Eprime software (Psychology Software Tools, Pittsburgh, PA) controlled the presentation of the stimuli and recorded response times (RTs).…”

“…In the following experiment, the participants had to decide as quickly as possible whether words were "abstract" (e.g., freedom or curse) or "concrete" (e.g., baby or duck). A concrete word was defined as any word whose referent can be experienced by the senses (Bonin, Méot, & Bugaiska, 2018). Among the concrete words, half referred to animate entities whereas the other half referred to inanimate entities.…”

“…As the concrete-abstract categorization task did not make the animacy dimension salient to the participants, the findings therefore suggest that animacy is a core semantic feature of word meaning. However, as pointed out by an anonymous reviewer, it may be asked whether animates were faster to categorize as concrete items than inanimates because the former words were also more concrete than the latter and concrete words are generally processed faster than abstract words (e.g., Schwanenflugel, Harnishfeger, & Stowe, 1988; see also Bonin et al, 2018). Concreteness ratings were obtained for our experimental words from the normative study.…”