Age, familiarity, imagery, pronunciability,and meaningfulness of verbal units of factual information

Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 1977, Vol. 9 (5), 325·328 Age, familiarity, imagery, pronunciability, and meaningfulness of verbal units of factual information DONALD F. PRATT and ALBERT E. GOSS Douglass College, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903 Limitations of available norms of attributes of verbal stimuli initiated this assessment of attributes of verbal units of topics of factual information. The attributes were ratings of age (A), familiarity (F), imagery (I), pronunciability (P), and meaningfulness (m'), and produced meaningfulness (m) of these units and of 24 nouns from Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan's (1968) list. The rs between means for A, F, I, m', and m ranged from .87 to .97 for 64 units that served as responses in verbal learning, from .61 to .92 for 32 units that served as stimuli, and from .72 to .92 for the 24 nouns. The rs that involved P were somewhat lower. Brown (1976) cataloged 172 sources of "scaled verbal materials" (letters, CVCs, words, etc.). Few, if any, of these sources are useful for those who wish to construct and use particular topics of factual information in prose and other formats in investigations of verbal behavior and verbal learning. Many sources are limited or excluded because the stimuli are all, or substantially, nonwords or words of only one or two grammatical functions that cannot readily be pooled across different norms. The grammatically heterogeneous words of some norms of word association are small in number and their attributes are limited to those derivable from distributions of associations. Were norms for several attributes of a considerable number of grammatically heterogeneous words now available, they might still be of limited use for investigations of verbal behavior and verbal learning with coherent factural information on some topic(s). Short of a list of many thousands of words, it is unlikely that previously calibrated lists, word-frequency counts excepted, would contain all of the critical words of many topics of factual information. When attributes of constituent verbal units of factual information are not manipulated, norms for these attributes may be dispensable . This is a short-run solution. In learning with particular topics, attributes of constituent units may be as important as they are in learning lists of single units or of paired associates (Goss & Nodine, 1965; Paivio, 1971). Moreover, particular topics should be describable by values of attributes of their constituent verbal units. New topics can then be compared with topics used previously . Most importantly, possible interactions between these attributes and other variables can be explored . Requests for reprints should be sent to Donald F. Pratt, Department of Psychology, Douglass College, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903 . Described here are the procedures and outcome of a calibration of attributes of verbal units that were constituents of factual information on several topics. One attribute was the number of different associations to a verbal item that were written or produced in 30 sec, produced or associative meaningfulness, (m); the other attributes were ratings of age (A), familiarity (F), visual imagery (I), pronunciability (P), and number of associates or rated meaningfulness (m'). These particular attributes are among those assessed frequently (Goss & Nodine, 1965) and those included in some recent calibrations of large numbers of words (Brown & Ure, 1969; Paivio, Yuille, & Madigan, 1968; Stratton, Jacobus, & Brinley, 1975). Moreover, they are among the most potent in the learning of lists of single units and paired associates constituted of various kinds of verbal stimuli (Goss & Nodine, 1965; Paivio, 1971). METHOD Verbal Units The topics of factual information had been selected and constructed de novo for an investigation of effects of study format and test format on acquisition and retention. These topics were selected within criteria of: (1) variety of content; (2) similarity of content to that encountered in school and popular sources, but unfamiliarity of the particular content to subjects; and (3) representation in 4 by 4 or 4 by 2 by 2 matrices. In these matrices, row and column headings were words or phrases and cell entries were names, words, phrases, or dates. The particular topics were "Carnivorous Plants," "First Women in Political Office," Natural Resources of Central Africa," and "Things Invented Twice ." Attributes of both matrix constituents and topic titles were scaled . Ratings of A, F, I, P, and m' were along 7-point scales whose extremes were designated by, respectively , "heard, saw before kindergarten, seen for frrst time"; "familiar (heard, seen frequently), unfamiliar"; " definite visual image, no visual image"; "easy to say, hard to say"; and "many associations, no associations." The first member of each of these pairs was scored "7," and the second member was scored "I." In order to compare values of attributes for these stimuli with values of attributes obtained for other stimuli in other 325 326 PRATT AND GOSS sources, 24 nouns (four at each of six levels of imagery) that had been scaled previously by Paivio et a1. (1968) were added. Subjects The 112 undergraduates who associated to and rated the verbal units were obtained from sections of the course in introductory psychology at Douglass College. Procedure Preparation of lists. For the first 96 subjects, the 124 verbal units, 25 for each of the 4 topics and the 24 Paivio et a1. nouns, were divided into 4 lists of 31 units each. Each list consisted of one topic title, one row and one column heading from the matrix for each topic, one cell entry from each row and column of the matrices, and one noun from each of the six intervals of values for imagery. Headings and cell entries were the critical verbal units of presentation of factual information of the topics in prose, constrained prose, tabular, and paired~ssociate for· mats. This division of the 124 stimuli was done four times to yield four sets of four lists of units. Orders of the 31 units of each of the 16 lists were then randomized. Each list of a random order of 31 units was accompanied by a computer-printout booklet of rating scales. The order of the five scales on each page of these booklets was randomized and their end points counterbalanced. Three subjects were assigned to each of 32 combinations of lists and end points. All units were rated by 24 students. Because the Paivio et al. (1968) nouns had occurred only with other nouns, they were also presented in an unmixed list to the remaining 16 students. Presentation of lists. Students participated in groups, with random assignment of individuals to a particular list orientation. They had 30 sec to rate each unit, an average of 6 sec/scale. After all 31 units were rated, the students turned to another random order of the same list. They had 30 sec to associate to each unit under instructions "to write down any other wor (...truncated)