Study title

United Kingdom

Individual

45 native British English speakers (between 18 and 40 years old) completed the verb property norm study. Participants were asked to list all the features they could think of for 137 verb concepts which included 12 verbs of appearance, disappearance and existence (e.g. appear, perish); 12 verbs of change of possession (e.g. give, sell); 12 verbs of change of state including verbs of transformation, removing and assuming a position (e.g. bend, grind); 12 verbs of communication, non verbal expression and gesture/sign involving body parts (e.g. shout, salute); 12 intransitive verbs of motion (e.g. crawl, run); 11 verbs with predicative complements (e.g. describe, judge); 11 verbs of psychological state (e.g. bore, offend); and 12 transitive verbs of motion, including verbs of putting, cutting, sending and carrying, combining and attaching, separating and disassembling (e.g. carry, drill). In addition, we included 9 verbs denoting imageable actions (e.g. curtsey, tiptoe) and 43unambiguous verbs (i.e. non homophonous with noun forms) from a variety of the previous classes (e.g. ignore, preach). The verb property norms were collected together with norms for 167 nouns which acted as fillers for this study. To disambiguate word class, all verbs were preceded by to, and all nouns by the, a(n). The 137 verbs were divided into four lists (three lists containing 34 verbs and one containing 35 verbs). Including the noun fillers, each of the four lists comprised 76 words, presented in a booklet, and was given to 45 participants. To avoid any list effects, the items in each list were arranged in two different orders, which were presented equally often toparticipants. Participants were instructed to work quickly through the paper booklet and were advised not to spend more than about half a minute on each word, but no actual time limit was set. This was a pen and pencil task.