Norms for Semantic Categories in the Croatian Language

Abstract

In this paper, norms for semantic categories used in Croatian everyday language are presented. We used the list of 64 categories from the norms in English language (Van Overschelde et al., 2004), and 2 categories were added to the list. In the study participated 194 subjects (M = 38, F = 156), mainly students of the University of Rijeka (92.3 %). The participants had to list four typical exemplars for each presented category. Measures that describe the status of each category are shown: total number of entities, number of entities with a frequency higher or equal to ten, number of high-frequency entities whose proportion is equal to or higher than .80, and response consistency index. Categories were ranked according to the response consistency indexes. Furthermore, for each category, entities with a frequency higher or equal to ten are presented, and the proportion, proportion of appearing in the first place, and the mean rank of the position of the response are presented for each entity. Category norms are a methodological research tool that can be used for systematization of verbal stimuli in future research in the Croatian language in the area of cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics and related fields.