Database of semantically associated and unassociated pairs of everyday objects for the study of memory in children : technical report

Abstract

The present study aimed at creating a database of standardized pairs of semantically associated and unassociated everyday objects for the use in research in experimental developmental psychology. We had a large sample of 289 German school-aged children rate a set of 300 single objects, 150 semantically related, and 150 unrelated pairs. In a first step, the participants had to name the presented single objects to indicate the expe-rienced level of familiarity for each item. The second part of the study focused on the rating of association strength of the pairs of objects. Here, we used a three-point rating scale to have the participants decide on the magnitude of semantic relatedness. For each single object, a familiarity score and a naming agreement ratio were calculated to quan-tify the degree of the children';s conceptual knowledge and familiarity with the selected objects. The relatedness scores computed for the pairs of objects can be used to divide the pairs into separate categories according to the strength semantic association. These rating procedures yielded a large and well controlled database of modern pictorial ma-terial for experimenters to choose from. It may be helpful for designing experiments in developmental psychology research with clinical and non-clinical populations.