Norms of valence, arousal, dominance, and age of acquisition for 4,300 Dutch words

Abstract

This article presents norms of valence/pleasantness, activity/arousal, power/dominance, and age of acquisition for 4,300 Dutch words, mainly nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs. The norms are based on ratings with a 7-point Likert scale by independent groups of students from two Belgian (Ghent and Leuven) and two Dutch (Rotterdam and Leiden-Amsterdam) samples. For each variable, we obtained high split-half reliabilities within each sample and high correlations between samples. In addition, the valence ratings of a previous, more limited study (Hermans & De Houwer, Psychologica Belgica, 34:115-139, 1994) correlated highly with those of the present study. Therefore, the new norms are a valuable source of information for affective research in the Dutch language.

Norms of age of acquisition and concreteness for 30,000 Dutch words

“…Ghent and Leuven are two towns in Flanders (the Dutch speaking half of Belgium) separated by 80 km. Moors et al (2013) found no differences in the ratings of the two universities for the variables they investigated, and there are no reasons to expect this would be otherwise for the present ratings. Still, as a precaution, the Ghent students provided the AoA norms, given that all previous AoA ratings in Dutch were collected there.…”

“…The importance of familiarity is likely to be minimal, once one has a good word frequency measure and information about AoA (Brysbaert & Cortese, 2011). Valence and arousal have recently gained interest (e.g., Kuperman et al, in press) but could not be included in the present study (see, however, Moors et al, 2013, who collected values for 4,300 words).…”

“…For AoA, list preparation was largely the same as for the concreteness ratings, except that the 4,300 stimuli of Moors et al (2013) were not included and that the remaining words were distributed over 4 lists of 6,500 words each (18-20 raters per list). Instructions were the same as in Moors et al (2013) (see Appendix A for the precise instructions in Dutch).…”

“…This means that Amazon Mechanical Turk is a less interesting tool to collect data for languages such as Dutch. However, Moors et al (2013) recently proposed an alternative solution. They showed that asking a limited group of participants to rate a list of 4,300 words returns the same outcome as the traditional approach of asking a large number of participants to rate 300 words each.…”

“…Ghyselinck, Custers, and Brysbaert (2003) collected ratings for a further 2,300 words from much used semantic categories (such as clothes, animals, utensils, birds, etc.). Finally, Moors et al (2013) collected ratings for 4,300 words. To our knowledge, there are no large collections of concreteness ratings, but imageability norms were collected by Van Loon-Vervoorn (1985) for 6,100 words.…”