Perceptual modality norms for 1121 Italian words: a comparison with concreteness and imageability scores and an analysis of their impact in word processing tasks.

Normative measures of verbal material are fundamental in psycholinguistic and cognitive research to control for confounding in experimental procedures and achieve a better comprehension of our conceptual system. Traditionally, normative studies focused on classical psycholinguistic variables, such as concreteness and imageability. Recent works shifted researchers’ focus to perceptual strength, in which items are separately rated for each of the five senses.We present a resource including perceptual norms for 1121 Italian words extracted from the Italian version of ANEW. Norms were collected from 57 native-speakers. For each word, participants provided perceptual strength ratings for each of the five perceptual modalities. Perceptual norms performance in predicting human behavior was tested in two novel experiments, a lexical decision and a naming task. Concreteness, imageability and different composite variables representing perceptual strength scores were considered as competing predictors in a series of linear regressions, evaluating the goodness-of-fit of each model.For both tasks, the model with imageability as predictor was found to be the best fitting model according to AIC, while the model with the separately considered five modalities better described data according to the explained variance. These results differ from the ones previously reported for English, in which maximum perceptual strength emerged as the best predictor of behavior. We investigated this discrepancy by comparing Italian and English data on the same set of translated items, thus confirming a genuine cross-linguistic effect. We conclude confirming that perceptual experience influences linguistic processing, even though evaluations from different languages are needed to generalize this claim.