Open AccessConcreteness/abstractness ratings for two-character Chinese words in MELD-SCH
Author(s) -
Xu Xu,
Jiayin Li
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0232133
Subject(s) - concreteness , character (mathematics) , word lists by frequency , psychology , word (group theory) , dimension (graph theory) , cognitive psychology , psycholinguistics , word processing , linguistics , computer science , natural language processing , cognition , mathematics , philosophy , geometry , neuroscience , pure mathematics , sentence
The concreteness-abstractness continuum is considered a primary dimension in the representation of semantic networks. Its theoretical importance and clinical significance are widely acknowledged. To assist and enhance future research, this study collected and evaluated concreteness/abstractness ratings for 9,877 two-character Chinese words retrieved from the MEga study of Lexical Decision in Simplified CHinese (MELD-SCH, Tsang et al, 2018). The ratings were validated through comparisons with previous rating studies on concreteness and imageability of smaller word samples. Relations of word concreteness with word frequency, age-of-acquisition, and efficiency of lexical processing were also examined. These ratings provide an additional dimension of information to two-character words in the database MELD-SCH, permitting not only more comprehensive research on the Chinese language, but also cross-language investigation of the concreteness effect between Chinese and other languages such as English and Dutch where a large database of concreteness ratings is also available.