BLIND: a set of semantic feature norms from the congenitally blind

• Published in: Behavior research methods Vol. 45; no. 4; pp. 1218 - 1233
• Main Authors: Lenci, Alessandro, Baroni, Marco, Cazzolli, Giulia, Marotta, Giovanna
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer US 01.12.2013; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Acebutolol; Acoustic Stimulation; Adult; Aged; Behavioral Science and Psychology; Blindness; Blindness - congenital; Blindness - psychology; Cognitive Psychology; Cognitive Science; English; Female; Humans; Hypotheses; Italian; Language; Language Tests - standards; Linguistics; Male; Memory; Memory - physiology; Middle Aged; Nouns; Psychology; Reference Values; Semantic Features; Semantic Memory; Semantic Processing; Semantics; Software; Verbs; Vision Disorders; Young Adult; Blind; Feature type annotation; Semantic memory; Feature norms; Feature production experiment
• ISSN: 1554-3528; 1554-351X; 1554-3528
• DOI: 10.3758/s13428-013-0323-4

Feature-based descriptions of concepts produced by subjects in a property generation task are widely used in cognitive science to develop empirically grounded concept representations and to study systematic trends in such representations. This article introduces BLIND, a collection of parallel semantic norms collected from a group of congenitally blind Italian subjects and comparable sighted subjects. The BLIND norms comprise descriptions of 50 nouns and 20 verbs. All the materials have been semantically annotated and translated into English, to make them easily accessible to the scientific community. The article also presents a preliminary analysis of the BLIND data that highlights both the large degree of overlap between the groups and interesting differences. The complete BLIND norms are freely available and can be downloaded from http://sesia.humnet.unipi.it/blind_data .