Concreteness norms for 521 portuguese words and their relation to language acquisition

Thayná Ananias,
Mahayana Godoy
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Abstract

Concreteness is a metric frequently present in normative studies of different languages (Bonin et al., 2003; Della Rosa et al., 2010; Soares et al. 2016). However, there are still no studies in Brazilian Portuguese, that we know of, involving the relationship between concreteness and age of acquisition by grammatical class. Therefore, we aim to insert this work in this gap. Concreteness is being understood as an attribute of a word related to the emergence of a sensory experience (Lima and Buratto, 2021). We carried out an online experiment to collect concreteness notes. In the end, we dealt with the total scores for 521 words given by 772 participants. Among the words considered to be more concrete, it was noted that nouns are considerably more concrete compared to all other classes. In contrast, the less concrete ones tend to be onomatopoeia, interjections or functional words. Overall, our results indicate that there does not appear to be a significant statistic correlation between concreteness and age of acquisition.

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