Skip to main content
. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2009 Sep 1.
Published in final edited form as: Biol Psychiatry. 2008 May 27;64(5):407–418. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2008.03.018

Table 1.

Sentence type and examples No. of content words per sentence Cloze probability y of congruous sentences Frequency of content words per sentence Concreteness rating of all content words, per sentence Concreteness rating of sentence-final words Min and Max Concreteness Rating Final word
ConcreteCongruous: During the rain storm he carried a large golf umbrella.
Incongruous: The twenty dairy cows are kept in the red bench.		 5.48
± 0.96		 0.74
± 0.19		 138.22±
107.89		 5.43
± 0.42		 6.30
± 0.42		 5.00,
6.89
Abstract:
Congruous:
Although she strove for perfection she continued to make mistakes.
Incongruous:
Her outer expressions were completely blank and revealed no equality.		 5.48
± 1.06		 0.69
± 0.21		 162.57
± 145.95		 3.64
± 0.47		 2.94
± 0.70		 1.22,
4.78
P Value 0.974 0.103 0.144 < 1 E -20 < 1 E -20

Means are shown with standard deviations in brackets. In the examples, critical sentence-final words are underlined.

Values for cloze probability and concreteness ratings (on a scale of 1–7) were derived in normative studies ratings in two separate groups of healthy participants who did not participate in the fMRI experiment. Frequencies (per million) were taken from Frances & Kucera (75).