Quantifying children's sensorimotor experience: Child body-object interaction ratings for 3,359 English words

Body-object interaction (BOI) ratings measure how easily the human body can physically interact with a word's referent. Previous research has found that words higher in BOI tend to be processed more quickly and accurately in tasks such as lexical decision, semantic decision, and syntactic classification, suggesting that sensorimotor information is an important aspect of lexical knowledge. However, limited research has examined the importance of sensorimotor information from a developmental perspective. One barrier to addressing such theoretical questions has been a lack of semantic dimension ratings that take into account child sensorimotor experience. The goal of the current study was to collect Child BOI rating norms. Parents of children aged 5 – 9-years-old were asked to rate words according to how easily an average 6-year-old child can interact with each word’s referent. The relationships of Child and Adult BOI ratings with other lexical semantic dimensions were assessed, as well as the relationships of Child and Adult BOI ratings with age of acquisition. Child BOI ratings were more strongly related to valence and sensory experience ratings than Adult BOI ratings and were a better predictor of three different measures of age of acquisition. The results suggest that child-centric ratings such as those reported here provide a more sensitive measure of children’s experience that can be used to address theoretical questions in embodied cognition from a developmental perspective.