Withstanding the test of time: The 1978 semantic word norms

Abstract

This article accompanies the archiving by the Pychonomic Society of the Toglia and Battig (1978) semantic word norms. Herein are outlined the various phases of the project, as well as the challenges that were faced in staying the course during the labor-intensive development of the norms. An examination of the number of citations of this set of norms over the years demonstrates a stable employment of these norms by investigators in many fields. Indeed, a concluding section details the wide range of research topics that have been studied with the use of this extensive set of word ratings. The complete Toglia and Battig article and norms may be downloaded as supplemental materials for this article from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental. © 2009 The Psychonomic Society, Inc.