Distinguishing abstraction from abstractness: Specificity norms for 8,500 English words

Psycholinguistic norms quantify dimensions of word form, use, and/or meaning and are important for studies involving word stimuli. Among the most commonly used norms are those for concreteness, quantifying the degree to which a word's referent can be understood through the senses. The dimension of concreteness has been found to be related to performance in language processing and memory tasks, yet recent research suggests that (1) ratings of concreteness may be conflated with how specific a word's meaning is, and (2) concreteness and specificity may have opposite effects on lexical-semantic processing. In the present study, we collected specificity scores for a large sample of English words, assessed their reliability and validity, and tested their relationships to lexical processing and memory accuracy. We found that specificity and concreteness are indeed correlated and have different behavioural effects. This large dataset of specificity scores will be an important resource for future lexical-semantic studies.