Perceptual Strength, Concreteness, Imagibility, Context Availability, Age of Acquisition, Familiarity, Emotional valence, and Arousal Ratings for 2100 Serbian Nouns and their Effect on Visual Lexical Decision Latencies

In this norming study, for 2100 Serbian nouns, we collected ratings on familiarity, concreteness, imageability, age of acquisition, context availability, emotional valence, arousal, the possibility of experiencing a concept on each of the five sensory modalities (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile), and the extent of the actual experience for the same concept. Based on the sensory ratings, the integrative perceptual richness measures were derived: maximal perceptual strength, modality exclusivity, number of modalities, the sum of ratings, Euclidian vector length, and Minkowski 3 distance. The principal component analysis revealed different factor structure for the perceptual strength measures based on the possible and the real experience. All modalities except the auditory grouped into one component for a possible experience. On the other hand, PCA analysis for the real experience ratings showed that the gustatory and olfactory modality migrated into a separate dimension, suggesting that concepts are less multimodal and described mainly by visual/tactile olfactory/gustatory experience. Finally, we conducted a lexical decision over the entire data set of words. Gustatory, olfactory and tactile strength significantly accelerated word processing when estimates were based on the possible experience. When estimates were grounded on real experience, auditory strength inhibited processing additionally. Analysis of the perceptual richness measures showed that the modality exclusivity was the only measure with the consistent inhibitory effect in all analyses. Because the high values of modality exclusivity indicated the unimodality's tendency, our results showed that words perceived with only one modality took more time to process.