Estimates of imagery, ease of definition, and animateness for 328 adjectives.

Abstract

In Experiment 1, 328 adjectives were presented to subjects for rating of imagery (I), ease of definition (ED), and animateness (A). The normative value of these indices is tabulated for each adjective. A correlational analysis of these measures and Kucera-Francis frequency (KF) is also presented. To demonstrate the usefulness of these rating scales, Experiment 2 requested subjects to free recall a list of 50 adjectives after they completed an incidental learning task of rating these adjectives for I, ED, or A. The subjects recalled more high I than low I adjectives and more difficult-than easy-to-define adjectives regardless of which incidental rating task they performed. Neither the degree of animateness nor the KF value of the adjectives influenced the percentage of recall.Normative data on the attributes of words relevant to their storage and retrieval characteristics exist for nouns (e.g., Paivio, Yuille, & Madigan, 1968) and for verbs (e.g., Klee & Legge, 1976), but similar data are not readily available for adjectives, despite a considerable interest in the role played by adjectives in the memory of phrases and sentences. For example, Kusyszyn and Paivio (1966) have studied the recall of adjective-noun pairs as a function of word order and of noun abstractness. Horowitz and Manelis (1972) have studied the degree of unity between adjective-noun pairs and the kinds of bonding that exist. Deese (1965) andJohnson (1970) have found that a noun generally elicits a greater diversity of associates than does an adjective. Lockhart (1969) andPeterson (1971) attempted to study the effect of the imagery rating and grammatical classification (noun or adjective) on cued and free recall. Unfortunately, Lockhart did not have normative data on the adjectives and nominalized Requests for reprints should be sent to Neal

Using English Words

“…Paivio et al (1968) had examined 925 nouns, spread in their frequency of occurrence from common to uncommon. Berrian et al (1979) returned a similar finding using 328 adjectives. These researchers correlated their values on that scale with other variables: High imagery correlated with 'concreteness' at a level of .83; and it correlated at a level of .90 with 'meaningfulness' (defined as the mean number of written associations that could be made in 30 seconds).…”

Lexicosemantic, affective, and distributional norms for 1,000 Dutch adjectives

“…The 488 Dutch adjectives from van Loon-Vervoorn (1985) were included. The 328 English adjectives from Berrian et al (1979) were translated into Dutch and were included as well. Other research purposes (reported in De Deyne, Voorspoels, Verheyen, Navarro, & Storms, 2014) prompted us to add additional adjectives for a total of 1,000.…”

“…The predominance of nouns is also reflected in available norm studies (Bird, Franklin, & Howard, 2001). Whenever adjectives are included in norm studies, they are either few in number (Altarriba, Bauer, & Benvenuto, 1999;Berrian, Metzler, Kroll, & Clark-Meyers, 1979;Grühn & Smith, 2008;Võ et al, 2009) or data for a small number of variables is obtained (Anderson, 1968;Bird et al, 2001;Brysbaert, Stevens, De Deyne, Voorspoels, & Storms, 2014a;Kuperman, Stadthagen-Gonzalez, & Brysbaert, 2012;Lynott & Connell, 2009;van Loon-Vervoorn, 1985). To avoid sampling bias, to allow for generalization, and to ensure that the critical lexical variables can be controlled for, norming data for a variety of words and variables are required, however (Clark & Paivio, 2004;Kousta, Vinson, & Vigliocco, 2009).…”

The spacing effect, free recall, and two-process theory: A closer look.

“…Stimuli consisted of 22 high-frequency nouns and 22 high-frequency adjectives that were four to seven letters in length and were selected to avoid obvious semantic associations among items. All words were high-imagery items with the nouns being greater than 5.3 on the 7-point scale used by Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) and the adjectives being greater than 3.6 on the 5-point scale used by Berrian, Metzler, Kroll, and Clark-Meyers (1979).…”