Psycholinguistic measures for German verb pairs : semantic transparency, semantic relatedness, verb family size, and age of reading acquisition

Abstract

A central issue in visual and spoken word recognition is the lexical representation of complex words-in particular, whether the lexical representation of complex words depends on semantic transparency: Is a complex verb like understand lexically represented as a whole word or via its base stand, given that its meaning is not transparent from the meanings of its parts? To study this issue, a number of stimulus characteristics are of interest that are not yet available in public databases of German. This article provides semantic association ratings, lexical paraphrases, and vector-based similarity measures for German verbs, measuring (a) the semantic transparency between 1,259 complex verbs and their bases, (b) the semantic relatedness between 1,109 verb pairs with 432 different bases, and (c) the vector-based similarity measures of 846 verb pairs. Additionally, we include the verb regularity of all verbs and two counts of verb family size for 184 base verbs, as well as estimates of age of acquisition and age of reading for 200 verbs. Together with lemma and type frequencies from public lexical databases, all measures can be downloaded along with this article. Statistical analyses indicate that verb family size, morphological complexity, frequency, and verb regularity affect the semantic transparency and relatedness ratings as well as the age of acquisition estimates, indicating that these are relevant variables in psycholinguistic experiments. Although lexical paraphrases, vector-based similarity measures, and semantic association ratings may deliver complementary information, the interrater reliability of the semantic association ratings for each verb pair provides valuable information when selecting stimuli for psycholinguistic experiments.