Abstract
Dissociations between noun and verb processing are not uncommon after brain injury; yet, precise psycholinguistic comparisons of nouns and verbs are hampered by the underrepresentation of verbs in published semantic word norms and by the absence of contemporary estimates for part-of-speech usage. We report herein imageability ratings and rating response times (RTs) for 1,197 words previously categorized as pure nouns, pure verbs, or words of balanced noun-verb usage on the basis of the Francis and Kučera (1982) norms. Nouns and verbs differed in rated imageability, and there was a stronger correspondence between imageability rating and RT for nouns than for verbs. For all word types, the image-rating-RT function implied that subjects employed an image generation process to assign ratings. We also report a new measure of noun-verbtypicality that used the Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL; Lund & Burgess, 1996) context vectors (derived from a large sample of Usenet text) to compute the mean context distance between each word and all of thepure nouns andpure verbs. For a subset of the items, the resulting HAL noun-verb difference score was compared with part-of-speech usage in a representative sample of the Usenet corpus. It is concluded that this score can be used to estimate the extent to which a given word occurs in typical noun or verb sentence contexts in informal contemporary English discourse. The item statistics given in Appendix B will enable experimenters to select representative examples of nouns and verbs or to compare typical with atypical nouns (or verbs), while holding constant or covarying rated imageability.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Balota, D. A., &Chumbley, J. I. (1984). Are lexical decisions a good measure of lexical access? The role of word frequency in the neglected decision stage.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,10, 340–357.
Balota, D. A., Ferraro, F. R., &Connor, L. T. (1991). On the early influence of meaning in word recognition: A review of the literature. In P. J. Schwanenflugel (Ed.),The psychology of word meanings (pp. 187–222). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Berndt, R. S., Mitchum, C. C., Haendiges, A. N., &Sandson, J. (1997). Verb retrieval in aphasia: 1. Characterizing single word impairments.Brain & Language,56, 68–106.
Burgess, C. (1998). From simple associations to the building blocks of language: Modeling meaning in memory with the HAL model.Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers,30, 188–198.
Burgess, C., &Livesay, K. (1998). The effect of corpus size in predicting reaction time in a basic word recognition task: Moving on from Kučera & Francis.Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers,30, 272–277.
Burgess, C., Livesay, K., &Lund, K. (1998). Explorations in context space: Words, sentences, and discourse.Discourse Processes,25, 211–257.
Burgess, C., &Lund, K. (1997). Modeling parsing constraints with high-dimensional context space.Language & Cognitive Processes,12, 177–210.
Caplan, D. (1987).Neurolinguistics and linguistic aphasiology: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Caramazza, A., &Hillis, A. E. (1991). Lexical organization of nouns and verbs in the brain.Nature,349, 788–790.
Cohen, J., &Cohen, P. (1983).Applied multiple regression/correlation analysis for the behavioral sciences. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Cohen, J., MacWhinney, B., Flatt, M., &Provost, J. (1993). Psy-Scope: An interactive graphic system for designing and controlling experiments in the psychology laboratory using Macintosh computers.Behavioral Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers,25, 257–271.
Daniele, A., Guistolisi, L., Silveri, M. C., Colosimo, C., &Gainotti, G. (1994). Evidence for a possible neuroanatomical basis for lexical processing of nouns and verbs.Neuropsychologia,32, 1325–1342.
Forster, K. I. (1994). Computational modeling and elementary process analysis in visual word recognition.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,20, 1292–1310.
Francis, W. N., &Kučera, H. (1982).Frequency analysis of English usage: Lexicon and grammar. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Friendly, M., Franklin, P. E., Hoffman, D., &Rubin, D. C. (1982). The Toronto Word Pool: Norms for imagery, concreteness, orthographic variables, and grammatical usage for 1,080 words.Behavior Research Methods & Instrumentation,14, 375–399.
Koenig, T., &Lehmann, D. (1996). Microstates in language-related brain potential maps show noun-verb differences.Brain & Language,53, 169–182.
Komatsu, L. K. (1992). Recent views of conceptual structure.Psychological Bulletin,112, 500–526.
Lakoff, G. (1987).Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lund, K., &Burgess, C. (1996). Producing high-dimensional semantic spaces from lexical co-occurrence.Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers,28, 203–208.
Lund, K., &Burgess, C. (1998, November).What’s in a context representation, and how do we know? Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for Computers in Psychology, Dallas.
Molfese, D. L., Burger-Judisch, L. M., Gill, L. A., Golinkoff, R. M., &Hirsch-Pasek, K. A. (1996). Electrophysiological correlates of noun-verb processing in adults.Brain & Language,54, 388–413.
Monsell, S., Doyle, M. C., &Haggard, P. N. (1989). Effects of frequency on visual word recognition tasks: Where are they?Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,118, 43–71.
Paivio, A. V.,Yuille, J. C., &Madigan, S. A. (1968). Concreteness, imagery, and meaningfulness values for 925 nouns.Journal of Experimental Psychology Monographs,76 (1, Pt. 2, Suppl.).
Rosch, E., &Mervis, C. B. (1975). Family resemblances: Studies in the internal structure of categories.Cognitive Psychology,7, 573–605.
Ross, J. R. (1973). Nouniness. In O. Fujimura (Ed.),Three dimensions of linguistic theory (pp. 138–257). Tokyo: TEC Company Ltd.
Seidenberg, M. S., &McClelland, J. L. (1989). A distributed, developmental model of word recognition and naming.Psychological Review,96, 523–568.
Smith, E. E., Shoben, E. J., &Rips, L. J. (1974). Structure and process in semantic memory: A featural model for semantic decisions.Psychological Review,81, 214–241.
Stone, G. O., &Van Orden, G. C. (1993). Strategic control of processing in word recognition.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,19, 744–774.
Toglia, M. P., &Battig, W. F. (1978).Handbook of semantic word norms. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Warburton, E., Wise, R. J. S., Price, C. J., Weiller, C., Hadar, U., Ramsay, S., &Frackowiak, R. S. J. (1996). Noun and verb retrieval by normal subjects: Studies with PET.Brain,119, 159–179.
Zingeser, L. B., &Berndt, R. S. (1990). Retrieval of nouns and verbs in agrammatism and anomia.Brain & Language,39, 14–32.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This research was supported by NSF Grant 97-29009 to C.C. and by NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow Award SBR-9453406 to C. Burgess. We thank Stella Liu, Ron Hasbrooke, and Nancy Quan for their assistance with this project and Curt Burgess, Natalie Kacinik, and Stella Liu for helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.
Electronic supplementary material
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Chiarello, C., Shears, C. & Lund, K. Imageability and distributional typicality measures of nouns and verbs in contemporary English. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers 31, 603–637 (1999). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03200739
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03200739