Lexicosemantic, affective, and distributional norms for 1,000 Dutch adjectives
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Lexicosemantic, affective, and distributional norms for 1,000 Dutch adjectives Steven Verheyen 1 & Simon De Deyne 2 & Sarah Linsen 1 & Gert Storms 1
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2019
Abstract The research of the word is still very much the research of the noun. Adjectives have been largely overlooked, despite being the second-largest word class in many languages and serving an important communicative function, because of the rich, nuanced qualifications they afford. Adjectives are also ideally suited to study the interface between cognition and emotion, as they naturally cover the entire range of lexicosemantic variables such as imageability (infinite–green), and affective variables such as valence (sad–happy). We illustrate this by showing how the centrality of words in the mental lexicon varies as a function of the words’ affective dimensions, using newly collected norms for 1,000 Dutch adjectives. The norms include the lexicosemantic variables age of acquisition, familiarity, concreteness, and imageability; the affective variables valence, arousal, and dominance; and a variety of distributional variables, including network statistics resulting from a large-scale word association study. The norms are freely available from https://osf.io/nyg8v/, for researchers studying adjectives specifically or for whom adjectives constitute convenient stimuli to study other topics, such as vagueness, inference, spatial cognition, or affective word processing. Keywords Age of acquisition . Arousal . Concreteness . Dominance . Familiarity . Imageability . Valence The research of the word is predominantly the research of the noun (Clark & Paivio, 2004; Medin, Lynch, & Solomon, 2000). Adjectives in particular have been overlooked, perhaps because not all languages have this word class and because they are often defined negatively, as a set of lexical items that are distinct from the universal noun and verb classes on morphological and syntactic grounds (Dirven & Taylor, 1988; Dixon, 1982; Vogel, 2004). In many languages adjectives are, however, undeniably important parts of speech, both because of their number and because of their semantic role. The CELEX count for Dutch words, for instance, contains 95,657 nouns, 13,912 adjectives, and 11,837 verbs (Baayen, Piepenbrock, & van Rijn, 1993). In the BSmall World of Words^ Dutch word association norms (SWOW-NL, De Deyne & Storms, 2008a) 18% of the produced associations are adjectives, making them the second most frequently produced word class (after nouns with 72%). Semantically, nouns refer to concepts, whereas adjectives refer to properties (Gärdenfors, 2000). In communication adjectives thus allow * Steven Verheyen [email protected] 1
KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
2
University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
one to distinguish or identify instances that are referred to by the same noun (as in: hand me the tall glass; Dixon, 1982). Adjectives also constitute the majority of the hubs in semantic networks, connecting distinct parts of the mental lexicon (e.g., the ad
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