Battig {WordPools}

Battig - Montague Categorized Word Norms

Description

This dataset comprises a ranked list of 5231 words listed in 56 taxonomic categories by people who were asked to list as many exemplars of a given category ("a precious stone", "a unit of time", "a fruit", "a color", etc.). Participants had 30s to generate as many responses to each category as possible, after which time the next category name was presented.

Included in this dataset are all words from the Battig and Montague (1969) norms listed with freq > 1.

Usage

data(Battig)

Format

A data frame with 5231 observations on the following 9 variables.

word

a character vector

catnum

category number, a factor

catname

category name, a factor

syl

number of syllables

letters

number of letters

freq

Frequency of response

frequency

Kucera-Francis word frequency

rank

rank of freq within the category

rfreq

rated frequency

Details

In our original dataset, words were truncated at 18 characters, so some are incomplete.

Source

Battig, W.F. & Montague, W.E. (1968). Category norms for verbal items in 56 categories: A replication and extension of the Connecticut norms using University of Maryland and Illinois students (Tech. Rep.) University of Colorado, Boulder, CO (1968)

Battig, W.F. & Montague, W.E. (1969). Category norms for verbal items in 56 categories: A replication and extension of the Connecticut norms. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 80 (1969), pp. 1-46

References

Joelson, J. M. & Hermann, D. J., Properties of categories in semantic | memory, Amer Journal of Psychology, 1978, 91, 101-114.

Examples

data(Battig)
## maybe str(Battig) ; plot(Battig) ...

# select items from several categories
cats <- c("fish", "bird", "flower", "tree")
for (c in cats) {
	cat("\nCategory:", c, "\n")	
	print(pickList(subset(Battig, catname==c), nitems=5))
}

# or, using sapply():
sapply(cats, function(c) pickList(subset(Battig, catname==c), nitems=5), simplify=FALSE)