Affective Norms for Hebrew Words
Amit G. Steinberg*
To my best knowledge, affective norms for Hebrew words have never been constructed. In this small experiment, I have constructed such basic norms for use in psychological experiments.
Use of the norms is free to all (of course – using the proper citation guidelines. For APA citation guidelines for URLs see http://www.apastyle.org/elecref.html).
* Department of Psychology,
Method
Apparatus
The experiment was conducted on an Intel Pentium IV-based personal computer with 19" inch display. Software was custom tailored and specially written for the current experiment.
Subjects
A total of 20 Ss from introductory psychology
classes at
Materials
200 Nouns of 3-5 letters length from the Frost word frequency norms (Frost, 2001). Each subject was required to rate the subjective frequency of a word on 1 (Low Frequency) to 7 (High Frequency) Likert scale. The words had subjective frequency higher than 4, and words with more than one way of pronunciation upon reading were excluded.
Procedure
Each subject was asked to rate the nouns on a 1-7 pleasantness Likert scale, where 1 represented a highly unpleasant word, 4 – a neutral word, and 7 – a highly pleasant one.
For each subject, the 200 words were displayed in a different pseudorandomized order.
Each word was displayed on the screen for 1.5s, and
than the screen went blank and the pleasantness scale was displayed. Subject
could take as much times as they liked to rate the words.
The whole session lasted approximately 11 minutes.
Results
Follow this link to get the Affective Norms for Hebrew Words in Excel format.
The table is pretty self explanatory. The first column designates the words. The second column is the average pleasantness rated by participants. Words rated close to 1 can be described as negative, those close to 7 – as positive, and those around 4 are neutral ones.
The third column is the standard deviation of the subjects' rating - the lower the value, the higher the agreement between subjects concerning the pleasantness of the word.
References
Frost, R. (2001). Hebrew Word Frequency. Retrieved