Department of Developmental and Social Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.
Department of Literature and Philosophy, University of Florence, Florence, Italy.
PLoS One. 2023 Oct 20;18(10):e0293031. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0293031. eCollection 2023.
Concreteness is a fundamental dimension of word semantic representation that has attracted more and more interest to become one of the most studied variables in the psycholinguistic and cognitive neuroscience literature in the last decade. Concreteness effects have been found at both the brain and the behavioral levels, but they may vary depending on the constraints of the context and task demands. In this study, we collected concreteness norms for English and Italian words presented in different context sentences to allow better control and manipulation of concreteness in future psycholinguistic research. First, we observed high split-half correlations and Cronbach's alpha coefficients, suggesting that our ratings were highly reliable and can be used in Italian- and English-speaking populations. Second, our data indicate that the concreteness ratings are related to the lexical density and accessibility of the sentence in both English and Italian. We also found that the concreteness of words in isolation was highly correlated with that of words in context. Finally, we analyzed differences between nouns and verbs in concreteness ratings without significant effects. Our new concreteness norms of words in context are a valuable source of information for future research in both the English and Italian language. The complete database is available on the Open Science Framework (doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/U3PC4).
具体性是单词语义表示的一个基本维度，在过去十年中，它引起了越来越多的关注，成为心理语言学和认知神经科学文献中研究最多的变量之一。在大脑和行为层面都发现了具体性效应，但它们可能因上下文和任务要求的限制而有所不同。在这项研究中，我们收集了英语和意大利语单词在不同语境句子中的具体性规范，以便在未来的心理语言学研究中更好地控制和操纵具体性。首先，我们观察到高的半分相关和克朗巴赫的α系数，这表明我们的评分非常可靠，可以在意大利语和英语使用者中使用。其次，我们的数据表明，具体性评分与英语和意大利语句子的词汇密度和可及性有关。我们还发现，孤立词的具体性与语境中词的具体性高度相关。最后，我们分析了名词和动词在具体性评分上的差异，没有发现显著的影响。我们的新语境单词具体性规范是未来英语和意大利语研究的宝贵信息来源。完整的数据库可在开放科学框架上获取（doi：10.17605/OSF.IO/U3PC4）。
