Body-object interaction ratings for 750 Spanish words

Abstract

An individual's sense of the extent to which her or his body physically interacts with objects in the environment (body-object interaction; BOI) has been empirically shown to modulate lexical and semantic processing of object names. To allow for further exploration of the nature of those effects, BOI ratings for 750 Spanish nouns were obtained from 178 young adult participants. Statistical analyses showed moderate correlations between BOI indicators and some psycholinguistic indexes, such as word imageability and age of acquisition. In addition, an exploration of lexical associative relationships revealed that high-BOI words have a consistent tendency to be associated with words naming parts of the body. The ratings could be useful to researchers who are interested in manipulating or controlling for the effects of BOI in their language-processing studies. The complete norms are available for free downloading at Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/kd5vf/).