Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Ratings of body object interaction (BOI) measure the ease with which the human body can interact with a word’s referent. Researchers have studied the effects of BOI in order to investigate the relationships between sensorimotor and cognitive processes. Such efforts could be improved, however, by the availability of more extensive BOI norms. In the present work, we collected BOI ratings for over 9,000 words. These new norms show good reliability and validity, and have extensive overlap with the words used in other lexical and semantic norms, and in available behavioral megastudies (e.g., the English Lexicon Project, Balota et al., 2007; the Calgary Semantic Decision Project, Pexman, Heard, Lloyd, & Yap, 2017). In analyses using the new BOI norms we found that high BOI words tended to be more concrete, more graspable, and more strongly associated with sensory, haptic, and visual experience than low BOI words. When we used the new norms to predict response latencies and accuracy data from behavioral megastudies we found that BOI was a stronger predictor of responses in the semantic decision task than in the lexical decision task. These findings are consistent with a dynamic, multi-dimensional account of lexical semantics. The norms described here should be useful for future research examining effects of sensorimotor experience on performance in tasks involving word stimuli.