Thematic relatedness production norms for 100 object concepts

Knowledge of thematic relations is an area of increased interest in semantic memory research because it is crucial to many cognitive processes. One methodological issue that researchers face is how to identify pairs of thematically related concepts that are well-established in semantic memory for mo...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jouravlev, Olessia, McRae, Ken
Other Authors: McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Springer US 2016
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/106166
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6449-9419
Description
Summary:Knowledge of thematic relations is an area of increased interest in semantic memory research because it is crucial to many cognitive processes. One methodological issue that researchers face is how to identify pairs of thematically related concepts that are well-established in semantic memory for most people. In this article, we review existing methods of assessing thematic relatedness and provide thematic relatedness production norming data for 100 object concepts. In addition, 1,174 related concept pairs obtained from the production norms were classified as reflecting one of the five subtypes of relations: attributive, argument, coordinate, locative, and temporal. The database and methodology will be useful for researchers interested in the effects of thematic knowledge on language processing, analogical reasoning, similarity judgments, and memory. These data will also benefit researchers interested in investigating potential processing differences among the five types of semantic relations.