Imageability and body-object interaction ratings for 599 multisyllabic nouns

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Understanding factors influencing word processing is crucial for cognitive science.
• Imageability and body-object interaction (BOI) are proposed to influence lexical and semantic tasks.
• Previous research has not comprehensively evaluated these variables for multisyllabic nouns across multiple tasks.

Purpose of the Study:

• To collect imageability and body-object interaction (BOI) ratings for 599 multisyllabic nouns.
• To investigate the unique contribution of imageability and BOI to performance in picture-naming, word-naming, lexical decision, and semantic categorization tasks.
• To provide researchers with validated ratings for controlling or manipulating these variables in future studies.

Main Methods:

• Collected imageability and BOI ratings for 599 multisyllabic nouns.
• Utilized existing databases (International Picture-Naming Project, English Lexicon Project) for picture-naming, word-naming, and lexical decision latencies.
• Collected new latency data for semantic categorization tasks.
• Performed hierarchical multiple regression analyses to assess the predictive power of imageability and BOI.

Main Results:

• Imageability and BOI ratings significantly accounted for unique variance in latency across all tested tasks (picture-naming, word-naming, lexical decision, semantic categorization).
• These effects remained significant even after controlling for other relevant variables such as print frequency, number of syllables/morphemes, and age of acquisition.
• The findings highlight the independent contributions of visual and sensorimotor information to word processing.

Conclusions:

• Imageability and body-object interaction (BOI) are robust predictors of lexical and semantic task performance for multisyllabic nouns.
• These ratings provide a valuable resource for researchers aiming to control for or investigate the influence of visual and sensorimotor properties in word processing.
• The study underscores the importance of considering both abstract and grounded cognition principles in understanding language processing.