Concreteness ratings for 36,000 Estonian words.

Abstract

We present a collection of concreteness ratings for 35,979 words in Estonian. The data were collected via a web application from 2278 native Estonian speakers. Human ratings of concreteness have not been collected for Estonian beforehand. We compare our results to Aedmaa etal. (2018), who assigned concreteness ratings to 240,000 Estonian words by means of machine learning. We show that while these two datasets show reasonable correlation (R = 0.71), there are considerable differences in the distribution of the ratings, which we discuss in this paper. Furthermore, the results also raise questions about the importance of the type of scale used for collecting ratings. While most other datasets have been compiled based on questionnaires entailing five- or seven-point Likert scales, we used a continuous 0-10 scale. Comparing our rating distribution to those of other studies, we found that it is most similar to the distribution in Lahl et al. (Behavior Research Methods, 41(1), 13-19, 2009), who also used a 0-10 scale. Concreteness ratings for Estonian words are available at OSF .