Author:

Keywords:

Social Sciences, Psychology, Mathematical, Psychology, Experimental, Psychology, AGE-OF-ACQUISITION, WORD-FREQUENCY, CONTEXT-AVAILABILITY, CATEGORY NORMS, DOMAIN DIFFERENCES, REPRESENTATIONS, TYPICALITY, CONCRETENESS, DOMINANCE, MEMORY, Adolescent, Adult, Female, Humans, Judgment, Male, Middle Aged, Netherlands, Reproducibility of Results, Semantics, Vocabulary, 0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing, 1701 Psychology, 1702 Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology, 4905 Statistics, 5202 Biological psychology, 5204 Cognitive and computational psychology

Abstract:

Features are at the core of many empirical and modeling endeavors in the study of semantic concepts. This article is concerned with the delineation of features that are important in natural language concepts and the use of these features in the study of semantic concept representation. The results of a feature generation task in which the exemplars and labels of 15 semantic categories served as cues are described. The importance of the generated features was assessed by tallying the frequency with which they were generated and by obtaining judgments of their relevance. The generated attributes also featured in extensive exemplar by feature applicability matrices covering the 15 different categories, as well as two large semantic domains (that of animals and artifacts). For all exemplars of the 15 semantic categories, typicality ratings, goodness ratings, goodness rank order, generation frequency, exemplar associative strength, category associative strength, estimated age of acquisition, word frequency, familiarity ratings, imageability ratings, and pairwise similarity ratings are described as well. By making these data easily available to other researchers in the field, we hope to provide ample opportunities for continued investigations into the nature of semantic concept representation. These data may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society's Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, www.psychonomic.org/archive.