In the present study, we developed affective (valence and arousal) and sensory–motor (concreteness and imageability) norms for 210 English idioms rated by native English speakers (L1) and English second-language speakers (L2). Based on internal consistency analyses, the ratings were found to be highly reliable. Furthermore, we explored various relations within the collected measures (valence, arousal, concreteness, and imageability) and between these measures and some available psycholinguistic norms (familiarity, literal plausibility, and decomposability) for the same set of idioms. The primary findings were that (i) valence and arousal showed the typical U-shape relation, for both L1 and L2 data; (ii) idioms with more negative valence were rated as more arousing; (iii) the majority of idioms were rated as either positive or negative with only 4 being rated as neutral; (iv) familiarity correlated positively with valence and arousal; (v) concreteness and imageability showed a strong positive correlation; and (vi) the ratings of L1 and L2 speakers significantly differed for arousal and concreteness, but not for valence and imageability. We discuss our interpretation of these observations with reference to the literature on figurative language processing (both single words and idioms).

Our main objective was to analyze the role of imageability in relation to the age of acquisition (AoA) of nouns and verbs in Spanish-speaking children with Down syndrome (DS) and their peers with typical development (TD). The AoA of nouns and verbs was determined using the MacArthur-Bates CDIs adapted to the profile of children with DS. The AoA was analyzed using a linear mixed-effect model, including factors of imageability, group, and word class, and controlling for word frequency and word length. This analysis showed that high imaginable and short words were acquired early. Children with DS acquired the words later than TD peers. An interaction between imageability and group indicated that the effect of imageability was greater in the DS group. We discuss this effect considering DS children’s phonological memory difficulties. The overall results confirm the role that imageability and word length play in lexical acquisition, an effect that goes beyond word class.

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.

The current study explored the picture naming performance of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). First, we evaluated the utility of the Multilingual Naming Test (MINT; Gollan et al., 2011), which was designed to assess naming skills in speakers of multiple languages, for detecting naming impairments in monolingual AD and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI). If the MINT were sensitive to linguistic impairment in AD, using it in clinical practice might have advantages over using tests exclusively designed for English monolinguals. We found that the MINT can be used with both monolinguals and bilinguals: A 32-item subset of the MINT is best for distinguishing monolingual patients from controls, while the full MINT is best for assessing degree of bilingualism and language dominance in bilinguals. We then investigated the cognitive mechanisms underlying naming impairment in AD. To this end, we explored which MINT item characteristics best predicted performance differences between monolingual patients and controls. We found that contextual diversity and imageability, but not word frequency (nor words’ number of senses), contributed unique variance to explaining naming impairments in AD. These findings suggest a semantic component to the naming impairment in AD (modulated by names’ semantic richness and network size). (JINS, 2013, 19, 1–12)

In this paper, we make a fundamental distinction between literacy attainment scores and the actual process of learning to read, and examine these two aspects of reading in atypical development. Reading skills in a group of children and adults with the genetic disorder Williams syndrome (WS) were compared to a group of typically developing children matched for reading age and receptive vocabulary scores. Study 1 focused on the product of reading and explored the relationship between reading, general cognition, and phonological skills. Phonological skills were shown to be related to individual differences in reading attainment in both groups, although more weakly in the WS group. Experiment 2 examined the process of learning to read. The two groups were taught to associate abbreviated spellings (cues) with spoken words. The cues differed in their phonetic closeness to the target words, whereas the target words differed on the semantic variable of imageability. Compared to controls, the WS group showed slower learning, less sensitivity to the phonetic quality of the cue, and reduced influence from the imageability of words. The results support the hypothesis that although reading levels in WS depend on phonological skills, the full development of their reading is compromised by weak semantics. The studies highlight the importance in atypical populations of examining both reading levels and the actual process of learning to read.