Selection of high-imagery words for the study of episodic memory from middle childhood to old age

Abstract

The goal of the present study was to select a set of highly imaginable and concrete words that can be used in age-comparable memory research. The selection process included two steps. First, 10 children aged 7-9 years rated 400 high-imagery, concrete, and meaningful words selected from an existing corpus of 1082 spoken words (Singer et al., 2003) on a three-point scale of comprehensibility. Second, two independent raters further selected words to reduce the likelihood of lexical error during recall. As a result, 413 words were retained as stimulus materials for age-comparative investigations of episodic memory performance.