CONcreTEXT norms: Concreteness ratings for Italian and English words in context

Abstract

Concreteness is a fundamental dimension of word semantic representation that has attracted more and more interest to become one of the most studied variables in the psycholinguistic and cognitive neuroscience literature in the last decade. Concreteness effects have been found at both the brain and the behavioral levels, but they may vary depending on the constraints of the context and task demands. In this study, we collected concreteness norms for English and Italian words presented in different context sentences to allow better control and manipulation of concreteness in future psycholinguistic research. First, we observed high split-half correlations and Cronbach’s alpha coefficients, suggesting that our ratings were highly reliable and can be used in Italian- and English-speaking populations. Second, our data indicate that the concreteness ratings are related to the lexical density and accessibility of the sentence in both English and Italian. We also found that the concreteness of words in isolation was highly correlated with that of words in context. Finally, we analyzed differences between nouns and verbs in concreteness ratings without significant effects. Our new concreteness norms of words in context are a valuable source of information for future research in both the English and Italian language. The complete database is available on the Open Science Framework (doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/U3PC4).

How Continuous Concreteness Shapes Brain Processing and Concept Representation Across Diverse Tasks: Insights from an ERP Study

“…This intriguing finding may signify heightened demands on working memory, as the parietal P3 is widely recognized as a marker of working memory updating (Courchesne et al, 1975;Dien et al, 2004;Donchin, 1981;Friedman et al, 2001;Goldstein et al, 2002). The complexity inherent in more abstract concepts, with their multitude of meanings and variable concreteness degrees (Montefinese et al, 2023), imposes a substantial cognitive load. Selecting the correct meaning within memory and subsequently gauging the degree of concreteness becomes a more intricate task, demanding increased resources from working memory.…”

What We Mean When We Say Semantic: A multidiscilpinary semantic glossary

“…In fact, "side" has a medium concreteness score with a fairly high standard deviation, suggesting that judgments about the two senses of "side" are conflated in the final concreteness score. Recent studies have started to release datasets of concreteness ratings collected on words shown in context (Montefinese et al, 2023), tackling the different senses outlined above. However, there are other contextual factors that impact the perceived concreteness of a concept, including the actions that are performed with it: is the concreteness of "apple" the same, when we read "I imagined an apple" and "I bit an apple"?…”