Age-related evaluations of imageability and subjective frequency for 1286 neutral and emotional French words: ratings by young, middle-aged, and older adults.

Abstract

This study aimed at providing imageability and subjective frequency ratings collected from four adult age groups ranging from 18 to 85 years old (18-25; 26-39; 40-59; and 60 and over) for 1286 neutral and emotional French words available in the EMA database (Gobin et al., 2017). Overall, the older adults rated words as more (subjectively) frequent and more imageable than the younger adults. Furthermore, we examined the relationships between subjective frequency and imageability, as well as those with emotional variables (i.e., valence, arousal) already available for these words, for each age group. For all age groups, more subjective frequent words were more imageable. Emotional words were more imageable and more frequent. Arousal scores were lower for low- and high-imageability words, and higher for more subjective frequent words. The strength of these links between subjective frequency, imageability, and emotional ratings was found to decrease as a function of age. Finally, by using the lexical decision reaction times and accuracy rates of young adults from Megalex (Ferrand et al., 2018), imageability and subjective frequency across age were found to provide an additional contribution to visual word recognition performance as compared to objective lexical variables (i.e., number of letters, syllables, objective frequency, orthographic neighborhood). More importantly, subjective frequency and imageability ratings from the youngest group predicted reaction times and accuracy better than ratings from the oldest group. By providing new age-adapted word characteristics, this norm should be of great use to researchers in the field of cognitive aging who use word materials.