engleski

Data to Help us Form Images: The Abstract and Non- Imageable

When we say ‘a chair’ or ‘a dog’, we instantly and unconsciously imagine the picture of (a) dog or (a) chair. This does not happen when we say ‘peace’ or ‘experience’. Since numerous psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies, as well as educational models, use words in order to measure latencies and the accuracy of word recognition, they have to somehow account for this difference in their properties. Core concepts laying behind these properties are concreteness and imageability. They are claimed to play a significant role in remembering, recognizing and understanding not only words, but the complexity of the language architecture as well. Since normed ratings are not readily available for understudied languages such as Croatian, I will present Croatian Psycholinguistic Database freely available at: https://doi.org/10.17234/megahr.2019.hpb. This normative database was constructed within the project funded by the Croatian National Foundation: The Building Blocks of Croatian Mental Grammar: Constraints of Information Structure (Peti-Stantić et al. 2018). The database contains empirically established norms for the categories of concreteness, imageability, subjective frequency and age of acquisition for 6000 lexemes of Croatian words excerpted from the hrWaC web corpus of Croatian (Ljubešić & Klubička, 2016) by combining the hrLex inflectional lexicon with objective word frequencies from hrWac. The objective characteristics of each word are also coded, i.e., word length in number of characters, word class (noun, verb, adjective, and adverb), animacy and gender for nouns, and raw frequency in the hrWaC corpus. The ratings were collected in two experiments with 3, 000 words tested in each (Peti- Stantić et al. in print). A total of 3, 630 questionnaires were completed by the native speakers of Croatian, while every word was rated by an average of 30 participants. Analyses replicate the correlations reported in the literature, whereby words rated as more concrete are more highly imageable, shorter, acquired earlier and rated as more subjectively frequent. Differences in concreteness, imageability, subjective frequency and age of acquisition are reported amongst nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. I will discuss the data collected and differences between word classes from the perspective of constructional cognitive linguistic theories. I will also show the applicability of the database for researchers and practitioners.

Croatian Psycholinguistic Database, concreteness, imagaeability, word class

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