Normative Values of Concreteness for 730 Words Used by Spanish Speakers.

Abstract

The present study was aimed at compiling the concreteness values for a pool of words of particular interest to psychological research. The analyzed set included 730 words, most of which were common exemplars of natural categories according to Spanish-language norms. The rest of the words, which were added for methodological reasons, were selected from one of the most frequently used databases of psycholinguistic indexes in Spanish. This inclusion gave us the opportunity to update the concreteness values of these words as well as testing the stability of this index. The results support the stability of this index despite generational changes and changes in the sample size. The data obtained in this study enable researchers, clinicians and other professionals to make a more sophisticated usage of the verbal stimuli. Finally, this paper identifies the main limitations associated to normative studies for obtaining psycholinguistic indexes and suggests strategies for addressing these limitations.