Imageability of Norwegian nouns, verbs, and adjectives
Imageability is defined as the ease with one can form a mental image or a mental conception of what a word refers to.
Some words - like many concrete nouns – immediately give us a clear conception when hearing them, while other words - for example, more abstract nouns, verbs and adjectives - may not give rise to any mental conception at all.
Imageability is a factor believed to affect language processing, in line with, among other things, word frequency and word length. Imageability is therefore a factor often included in psycholinguistic studies.
Knowledge of how most people rate the degree of imageability for different words is often established through questionnaires. Such ratings have been conducted for English and German, among other languages, but for Norwegian there is still a lack of imageability standards.
The goal of this project is to establish standards of imageability for approximately 1 500 Norwegian nouns, verbs and adjectives. A pilot study was carried out in the spring of 2011, and the results were presented at the Second Nordic Conference of Clinical Linguistics (poster-pdf).
Project managers: Hanne Gram Simonsen, Marianne Lind
Project team members: Pernille Hansen, Elisabeth Holm