Verbs in space: axis and direction of motion norms for 299 English verbs

Meteyard, L. and Vigliocco, G. (2009) Verbs in space: axis and direction of motion norms for 299 English verbs. Behavior Research Methods, 41 (2). pp. 565-574. ISSN 1554-351X doi: 10.3758/BRM.41.2.565

Abstract/Summary

A strong body of work has explored the interaction between visual perception and language comprehension; for example, recent studies exploring predictions from embodied cognition have focused particularly on the common representation of sensory—motor and semantic information. Motivated by this background, we provide a set of norms for the axis and direction of motion implied in 299 English verbs, collected from approximately 100 native speakers of British English. Until now, there have been no freely available norms of this kind for a large set of verbs that can be used in any area of language research investigating the semantic representation of motion. We have used these norms to investigate the interaction between language comprehension and low-level visual processes involved in motion perception, validating the norming procedure’s ability to capture the motion content of individual verbs. Supplemental materials for this study may be downloaded from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.