Norms for Familiarity, Concreteness, Valence, Arousal, Wordlikeness, and Recall Accuracy for Swahili–Portuguese Word Pairs

Abstract

Normative studies are common in cognitive psychology because they allow us to estimate with more precision the attributes of the stimuli used in empirical studies. The studies reported here had four aims. The first three aims were to obtain estimates for (a) familiarity, concreteness, valence, and arousal for a single set of words in Brazilian Portuguese; (b) wordlikeness (similarity to Portuguese) of a set of foreign words (Swahili); and (c) recall accuracy of Swahili–Portuguese word pairs in a multitrial learning task. The fourth aim was to investigate if any of the assessed measures predicts recall accuracy. One-hundred twenty-eight participants took part in one of the three studies. In Studies 1a and 1b, participants judged 80 Portuguese words for familiarity, concreteness, valence, and arousal and 80 corresponding Swahili words for wordlikeness; in Study 2, participants carried out three study–test cycles of a set of Swahili–Portuguese word pairs. Overall, word-attribute estimates were reliable ( rs = .94–.98) and participants’ responses had high internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = .84–.98). Moreover, the relative difficulty of word pairs was retained across trials ( rs = .65–.88). Although different variables correlated with recall accuracy at different time points, multiple regressions indicate that none of the word-attribute variables predicted recall accuracy across trials. These norms may prove fruitful not only for Brazilian human memory researchers but also for international research teams, as it will enable the development of more controlled cross-cultural studies in this field.

The Greek-Cypriot Word Pool: Normative Data for Concreteness and Imageability for 2,950 Words

“…These observations support the view that while imagery and concreteness are strongly correlated, they are not identical constructs (Connell & Lynott, 2012;Dellantonio et al, 2014;Kousta et al, 2011;Richardson, 1975). Furthermore, the observation that several concrete words (e.g., κέδρος/cedar, βίσωνας/bison, υάκινθος/hyacinth) exhibit lower imagery scores supports previous findings indicating that various other variables (e.g., familiarity and subjective frequency) influence how words are processed (Boles, 1983;Guasch et al, 2016;Khwaileh et al, 2018;Lima & Buratto, 2021;Warriner et al, 2013;Yee, 2017). For example, all participants rated the word 'κέδρος/cedar' as concrete, since they recognized it as a type of tree.…”

The test–retest reliability of the retrieval practice effect

“…Sixty Swahili-Brazilian Portuguese word pairs were selected from a normative database (Lima & Buratto, 2021). These pairs were split into two sets with 30 pairs each.…”

Normative data for logographic and lexical Japanese paired associates

“…In summary, in their study, Grimaldi et al (2010) succeeded in both addressing the shortcomings of Nelson and Dunlosky's (1994) research whilst also providing normative paired-associate data for a distinct yet comparable language pair. Nonetheless, an enduring limitation of the literature on foreign language-English paired associates is that until recently, research has been confined to the production of normative data for alphabetic writing systems such as English, Swahili, Lithuanian, and Portuguese (Nelson & Dunlosky, 1994;Grimaldi et al, 2010;Lima & Buratto, 2021), leaving languages based on logographic writing systems such as Chinese and Japanese unexplored.…”