The Glasgow Norms are a set of normative ratings for 5,553 English words on 9 psycholinguistic dimensions: arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, imageability, familiarity, age of acquisition, semantic size, and gender association. The Glasgow Norms are unique in several respects. First, the corpus, itself, is relatively large while simultaneously providing norms across a substantial number of lexical dimensions. Second, for any given subset of words, the same participants provided ratings across all 9 dimensions (32 participants/word, on average). Third, two novel dimensions of semantic size and gender association are included. Finally, the corpus contains a set of 379 ambiguous words that are presented alone (e.g., toast) or with information that selects an alternative sense (e.g., toast (bread), toast (speech)). Relationships between the dimensions of the Glasgow Norms were initially investigated by assessing their correlations. In addition, a principal component analysis revealed four main factors accounting for 82% of the variance (“visualization,” “emotion,” “salience,” and “exposure”). The validity of the Glasgow Norms was established via comparisons of our ratings to 14 different sets of current psycholinguistic norms. Alternative senses of ambiguous words (i.e., disambiguated forms), when discordant on a given dimension, seemingly led to appropriately distinct ratings. Informal comparisons between ratings of ambiguous words and their alternative senses showed different patterns that likely depended on several factors (the number of senses, their relative strengths, and the rating scales, themselves). Overall, the Glasgow Norms provide a valuable resource, in particular, for researchers investigating the role of word recognition in language comprehension.
Psycholinguistic norms for more than 300 lexical signs in German Sign Language (DGS)
