Statistical and methodological problems with concreteness and other semantic variables: A list memory experiment case study

The purpose of this article is to highlight problems with a range of semantic psycholinguistic variables (concreteness, imageability, individual modality norms, and emotional valence) and to provide a way of avoiding these problems. Focusing on concreteness, I show that for a large class of words in the Brysbaert, Warriner, and Kuperman (Behavior Research Methods 46: 904–911, 2013) concreteness norms, the mean concreteness values do not reflect the judgments that actual participants made. This problem applies to nearly every word in the middle of the concreteness scale. Using list memory experiments as a case study, I show that many of the “abstract” stimuli in concreteness experiments are not unequivocally abstract. Instead, they are simply those words about which participants tend to disagree. I report three replications of list memory experiments in which the contrast between concrete and abstract stimuli was maximized, so that the mean concreteness values were accurate reflections of participants’ judgments. The first two experiments did not produce a concreteness effect. After I introduced an additional control, the third experiment did produce a concreteness effect. The article closes with a discussion of the implications of these results, as well as a consideration of variables other than concreteness. The sensorimotor experience variables (imageability and individual modality norms) show the same distribution as concreteness. The distribution of emotional valence scores is healthier, but variability in ratings takes on a special significance for this measure because of how the scale is constructed. I recommend that researchers using these variables keep the standard deviations of the ratings of their stimuli as low as possible.