Predicting high variability in imageability ratings across age groups and its influence on visual word recognition

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Imageability is a key psycholinguistic word characteristic.
• It's measured by ease of evoking mental images.
• Inter-rater disagreement in ratings is a concern.

Purpose of the Study:

• Explore inter-rater disagreement in imageability ratings.
• Identify predictors of rating variability across age groups.
• Assess the impact of variability on visual word recognition.

Main Methods:

• Analyzed French imageability ratings across age groups.
• Examined predictors of rating variability (word length, frequency, age of acquisition, emotionality).
• Used hierarchical regression to assess imageability's impact on lexical decision times, accounting for disagreement.

Main Results:

• High inter-rater disagreement was found for most words.
• Rating variability differed across age groups.
• Variability linked to longer, less frequent, later-learned, and less emotional words.
• Imageability remained a significant predictor of visual word recognition in young adults, despite disagreement.

Conclusions:

• Average imageability ratings may lack construct validity for highly variable items.
• Imageability reliably predicts visual word recognition for large datasets, but caution is needed for smaller ones.
• Age-related differences in imageability suggest further research into adult language processing.