Category Norms Research Articles

Category norms for verbal items in 25 categories for children in Grades 2–6

Three hundred and seventy-five children in Grades 2, 3, 4, and 6 were asked to generate instances of 25 different categories within a time period of 1 min per category. Data were tallied so that category instances are ranked as to proportion of subjects making each response at each grade level. Indications of the average number of category instances generated by children at each grade level within each category are provided.

Accuracy of Category-Size Estimates from the Battig and Montague (1969) Category Norms

Accuracy of Category-Size Estimates from the Battig and Montague (1969) Category Norms

Studies in Word Listing: Testing for Group Differences in Category Norms

Category norms for fifteen categories were collected from university students in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Various techniques were used to compare the norms derived from the responses of these two groups. The same techniques were applied to a comparison of the norms for men and women students. The results indicated that category norms can be very substantially affected by the ‘nationality’ or the sex of the normative group. Difficulties in the evaluation of the analytic techniques are discussed.

Relationships among goodness-of-example, category norms, and word frequency

The relationship between two indices of the internal structure of natural-language categories, goodness-of-example (as measured by subjects’ ratings), and item dominance (as assessed by category-norm data) was assessed by correlational analysis. For all eight categories examined, the two variables are significantly positively correlated. Item dominance also bears some positive relationship to word frequency, while goodness-of-example does not.

A factor analysis of six measures extracted from the category norms: Evidence for three properties of categories in semantic memory

Several investigations of the role of categories in semantic memory have studied the variable of category size. It is possible that categories possess other properties which also affect processing. Consequently, a study of the 56 categories in the Battig and Montague (1969) norms was undertaken to determine what other properties categories may possess. Six different measures were computed for each category, three of which were originally reported by Battig and Montague. A factor analysis of the intercorrelations of the six measures indicated that at least three factors underlie the data in the Battig and Montague norms. These three factors were tentatively interpreted as reflecting the properties of category size, category accessibility, and category familiarity.

Category norms of verbal items in 56 categories A replication and extension of the Connecticut category norms.

Category norms of verbal items in 56 categories A replication and extension of the Connecticut category norms.