Abstract
Imagery and concreteness norms and percentage noun usage were obtained on the 1,080 verbal items from the Toronto Word Pool. Imagery was defined as the rated ease with which a word aroused a mental image, and concreteness was defined in relation to level of abstraction. The degree to which a word was functionally a noun was estimated in a sentence generation task. The mean and standard deviation of the imagery and concreteness ratings for each item are reported together with letter and printed frequency counts for the words and indications of sex differences in the ratings. Additional data in the norms include a grammatical function code derived from dictionary definitions, a percent noun judgment, indexes of statistical approximation to English, and an orthographic neighbor ratio. Validity estimates for the imagery and concreteness ratings are derived from comparisons with scale values drawn from the Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) noun pool and the Toglia and Battig (1978) norms.
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This research was supported by Grant A8615 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada to the first author and by a postgraduate scholarship from the same council to the second author, at York University. We wish to thank Bennet B. Murdock, Jr., for his helpful comments. Grateful thanks are also extended to Lisa Polack for help in collecting and analyzing data and to Ron Collis for help in preparing this report.
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Friendly, M., Franklin, P.E., Hoffman, D. et al. The Toronto Word Pool: Norms for imagery, concreteness, orthographic variables, and grammatical usage for 1,080 words. Behavior Research Methods & Instrumentation 14, 375–399 (1982). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03203275
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03203275