Implicit consequentiality bias in English: A corpus of 300+ verbs

Abstract

This study provides implicit verb consequentiality norms for a corpus of 305 English verbs, for which Ferstl et al. (Behavior Research Methods, 43, 124-135, 2011) previously provided implicit causality norms. An online sentence completion study was conducted, with data analyzed from 124 respondents who completed fragments such as “John liked Mary and so…”. The resulting bias scores are presented in an Appendix, with more detail in supplementary material in the University of Sussex Research Data Repository (via https://doi.org/10.25377/sussex.c.5082122), where we also present lexical and semantic verb features: frequency, semantic class and emotional valence of the verbs. We compare our results with those of our study of implicit causality and with the few published studies of implicit consequentiality. As in our previous study, we also considered effects of gender and verb valence, which requires stable norms for a large number of verbs. The corpus will facilitate future studies in a range of areas, including psycholinguistics and social psychology, particularly those requiring parallel sentence completion norms for both causality and consequentiality.