Table 3.

Psycholinguistic and semantic features of the word and pseudoword stimuli.

Mean and s.d. (in brackets) are given for each feature and word category. Frequencies are given in occurrences per million words of standard text. Frequencies (word, bigram and trigram) and neighbours are taken from the CELEX Database. Semantic ratings of arousal, valence, imageability, concreteness and action-relatedness were on 7-point scales with 1 indicating no relationship and 7 indicating a strong relationship. Brackets at the top indicate that visually related words (Colour and Form) were matched for all the variables and that the remaining three word categories (Function, Number and Prepositions) were matched separately for length, bigram, trigram and word frequency, neighbours, arousal and valence. Differences between matched subsets were n.s. at p < 0.05 apart from imageability, concreteness and action-relatedness for the subset that included Function, Number and Prepositions (in grey).