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

Summary, in English

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.

• Author: Frida Blomberg; Carl Öberg
• Department/s: General Linguistics; Nephrology
• Publishing year: 2015
• Language: English
• Pages: 351-364
• Publication/Series: Nordic Journal of Linguistics
• Volume: 38
• Issue: 3
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0332586515000220
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Topic: General Language Studies and Linguistics
• Keywords: word ratings; Swedish; English; imageability; age of acquisition; familiarity; psycholinguistics; lexical database construction
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 0332-5865