Psycholinguistic norms for 92 action pictures and verbs in the Persian language in young- and middle-aged people

Abstract

A verb as the fundamental part of a sentence is important and its retrieval consists of different cognitive stages. Additionally, verb retrieval difficulty is reported in some types of aphasia and other neurological diseases, and some psycholinguistic variables can influence the verb retrieval process. This study aimed to provide a normative database in the Persian language for 92 black and white action pictures and related verbs in two groups of young ages (20 to 40 years old) and middle ages (41 to 64 years old). A total of 150 volunteers participated in this study, and the groups had similar characteristics due to education. The pictures were normed for variables such as name agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, age of acquisition, and image agreement. Correlation coefficients were calculated values among these measures, and comparisons were made between the two age groups. The results of the comparisons between the two groups showed that name agreement and familiarities were age-dependent. The results revealed that all measures varied with age. Also, the present study provided a set of verbs and their pictures in the Persian language and normative data were obtained on the psycholinguistic variables such that it can be used for clinical practice and research in the areas of verb processing and their naming.

Keywords:

• Action Pictures
• age of acquisition
• familiarity
• image agreement
• name agreement
• normative data
• Persian language
• verb
• visual complexity

Acknowledgment

We express our thanks to the participants who volunteered to take part in this study and to Dr. Mehdi Purmohammad for his helpful advice. We declare no conflict of interest.

Ethics statement

The Ethics Committee approved the entire procedure of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences (Ethics code: IR.MUI.REC.1397.037).

Author contributions

L. Ghasisin, M. Shariat, and S. Moayedfar conceived and designed this study, M. Shariat collected data, L. Ghasisin analyzed data, and all the researchers wrote this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Isfahan University of Medical Sciences [Research cod: 3,17,960].