The Minho word pool: norms for imageability, concreteness, and subjective frequency for 3,800 portuguese words

Abstract

Words are widely used as stimuli in cognitive research. Because of their complexity, using words requires a strict control of their objective (lexical and sublexical) and subjective properties. In this work we present the Minho Word Pool (MWP), a dataset that provides normative values of imageability, concreteness and subjective frequency for 3,800 (European) Portuguese words, three subjective measures, which in spite of being extensively used in research, were still scarce for Portuguese. Data were collected with 2,357 college students who were native speakers of European Portuguese. Participants rated 100 words drawn randomly from the full set in each of the three subjective indices using a web survey procedure (via a URL link). Analyses comparing the MWP ratings with those obtained for the same words from other national and international databases showed that the MWP norms are reliable and valid, thus providing researchers with a useful tool to support research in all neuroscientific areas using verbal stimuli. The MWP norms can be downloaded at http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental or at http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/about/databases.