Dutch modality exclusivity norms for 336 properties and 411 concepts

This study is a cross-linguistic, conceptual replication of Lynott and Connell’s (2009, 2013) modality exclusivity norms. Their English properties and concepts were translated into Dutch, then independently tested as follows. Forty-two respondents rated the auditory, haptic, and visual strength of those words. Mean scores were then computed, with a high interrater reliability and interitem consistency. Based on the three modalities, each word also features a specific modality exclusivity, and a dominant modality. The norms also include external measures of word frequency, length, distinctiveness, age of acquisition, and known percentage. Starting with the results, unimodal, bimodal, and tri-modal words appear. Visual and haptic experience are quite related, leaving a more independent auditory experience. These different relations are important because they may correlate with different levels of detail in word comprehension (Louwerse & Connell, 2011). Auditory and visual words tend toward unimodality, whereas haptic words tend toward multimodality. Likewise, properties are more unimodal than concepts. Last, the 'sound symbolism' hypothesis was tested by means of a regression: Auditory strength predicts lexical properties of the words (e.g., frequency, distinctiveness) better than the other modalities do, or else with a different polarity. All the data and analysis code are available at https://osf.io/brkjw/.

Augmented Modality Exclusivity Norms for Concrete and Abstract Italian Property Words

How perceptual information is encoded into language and conceptual knowledge is a debated topic in cognitive (neuro)science. We present modality exclusivity norms for 643 Italian property words referring to all five perceptual modalities, plus a set of abstract words. Overall, words were rated as mostly connected to the visual modality and least connected to the olfactory and gustatory modality. We found that words associated to visual and auditory experience were more unimodal compared to words associated to other sensory modalities. A principal components analysis highlighted a strong coupling between gustatory and olfactory information in word meaning, and the tendency of words referring to tactile experience to also include information from the visual dimension. Abstract words were found to encode only marginal perceptual information, mostly from visual and auditory experience. The modality norms were augmented with corpus–based (e.g., Zipf Frequency, Orthographic Levenshtein Distance 20) and ratings–based psycholinguistic variables (Age of Acquisition, Familiarity, Contextual Availability). Split-half correlations performed for each experimental variable con- firmed that our norms are highly reliable. This database thus provides a new important tool for investigating the interplay between language, perception and cognition.