PLoS ONE (Jan 2020)

Concreteness/abstractness ratings for two-character Chinese words in MELD-SCH.

  • Xu Xu,
  • Jiayin Li

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0232133
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 15, no. 6
p. e0232133

Abstract

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The concreteness-abstractness continuum is considered a primary dimension in the representation of semantic networks. Its theoretical importance and clinical significance are widely acknowledged. To assist and enhance future research, this study collected and evaluated concreteness/abstractness ratings for 9,877 two-character Chinese words retrieved from the MEga study of Lexical Decision in Simplified CHinese (MELD-SCH, Tsang et al, 2018). The ratings were validated through comparisons with previous rating studies on concreteness and imageability of smaller word samples. Relations of word concreteness with word frequency, age-of-acquisition, and efficiency of lexical processing were also examined. These ratings provide an additional dimension of information to two-character words in the database MELD-SCH, permitting not only more comprehensive research on the Chinese language, but also cross-language investigation of the concreteness effect between Chinese and other languages such as English and Dutch where a large database of concreteness ratings is also available.