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Swedish and English word ratings of imageability, familiarity and age of acquisition are highly correlated

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2015

Frida Blomberg  and
Carl Öberg
Frida Blomberg
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Box 201, SE-221 00 Lund, Sweden. [email protected]
Carl Öberg
Affiliation:
Department of Clinical Sciences, Biomedical Centre, BMC F11, Sölvegatan 19, SE-221 84 Lund, Sweden. [email protected]
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Abstract

At present, there is no comprehensive psycholinguistic database containing Swedish words with ratings of word properties such as e.g. imageability, although researchers carrying out psycholinguistic studies in Swedish face the need to be able to control for and systematically vary such properties. The present study addressed this issue by investigating the possibility of transferring English word ratings to Swedish. Imageability, familiarity and age of acquisition (AoA) ratings were obtained for a sample of Swedish words (N = 99). These ratings were then compared with the corresponding English ratings from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Psycholinguistic Database (Coltheart 1981) using Spearman correlation. Swedish and English word ratings were found to be highly correlated for imageability and AoA, and moderately correlated for familiarity. Following these results, we suggest that, in general, ratings of these variables can be reliably transferred between the two languages, although some caution should be taken, since for some individual words, some ratings might differ substantially for their Swedish and English translations.

Keywords

word ratingsSwedishEnglishimageabilityage of acquisitionfamiliaritypsycholinguisticslexical database construction
Type
Short Communications
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , December 2015 , pp. 351 - 364
Copyright
Copyright © Nordic Association of Linguistics 2015 

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