Generating Word Lists Why would you present word lists in experiments? In developing word lists, and in psycholinguistic experiments in general, the careful construction of your stimuli is absolutely CRUCIAL. What to avoid? CONFOUNDS

What specific features of words might influence how a subject responds to that word? Ball Train Car Mouse Shop Run Laugh Skip Talk Think Whats the difference between <------these two sets of words?

Love Hate Justice Freedom Stress Table Box Shoe Cup Pot What differentiates these? < _____________________________________________________ Telephone Industry Operation Catapult Shoe Dog Cat Fun And these? <

Words can vary on an almost innumerable set of dimensions Some obvious ones: letter length syntactic category no. of syllables concreteness imageability frequency

Further Information British National Corpus: -100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written. MRC Psycholinguistic Database: -database which allows retrieval of word sets, selected according to wide ranging criteria (e.g., no. of letters, no. of phonemes, no. of syllables, word frequencies, age of acquisition, etc.)