Animacy norms for 224 European Portuguese concrete words

Abstract

Words are frequently used, for example, as stimuli in cognitive and linguistic research. Consideringthat there are various psycholinguistic variables known to influence word processing (e.g., frequency,concreteness), it is important to control for those variables. Recently, it has been reported that animacy(the characteristic of being a living/animate or a non-living/inanimate entity) also affects variouscognitive and linguistic processes. In fact, animacy has been found to be one of the best predictors offree recall. However, animacy is still an uncontrolled variable in most studies and information aboutthis variable is still, for the most part, absent. In this study, we provide animacy norms for a set of224 European Portuguese concrete words. Such data should provide Portuguese researchers a helpfultool to start considering this dimension in a systematic way in their research.