Extensions of the Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) norms

The Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) norms for 925 nouns were extended in two ways, involved the collecting of a much more extensive and diverse set of properties from original ratings and other sources, and demonstrated both the redundancy among various measures and the tendency for some attributes to load on multiple factors.

Abstract

The Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) norms for 925 nouns were extended in two ways. The first extension involved the collecting of a much more extensive and diverse set of properties from original ratings and other sources. Factor analysis of 32 properties identified 9 orthogonal factors and demonstrated both the redundancy among various measures and the tendency for some attributes (e.g., age of acquisition) to load on multiple factors. The second extension collected basic ratings of imagery, familiarity, and a new age of acquisition measure for a larger pool of 2,311 words, including parts of speech other than nouns. The analysis of these ratings and supplementary statistics computed for the words (e.g., number of syllables, Kucera-Francis frequency) demonstrated again the relative independence of various measures and the importance of obtaining diverse properties for such norms. Implications and directions for future research are considered. The full set of new norms may be downloaded from www. psychonomic.org/archive/.