How to use the MRC Psycholinguistic database.
This database can be used to create word stimuli that have different properties and control
for other properties. For instance you might create a set of stimuli that differ on word
frequency but control for imagability. The database is very powerful but it is hard to use
without getting lots of words from the beginning of the alphabet. Here is one example of
how to select words that are nouns and verbs that differ on concreteness.
First, go to the web site:
http://www.psy.uwa.edu.au/mrcdatabase/uwa_mrc.htm
Next, select the types of information you want your report to print out:
Here I have select the word, the word frequency, the concreteness rating and the part of
speech to be printed out.
Next, we have to limit the range of words that get printed out, because it will only put out
5000 words and we don't want words just from the beginning of the alphabet. Filtering on
word length does this:
Finally, I'm going to filter on word type, because I only want nouns and verbs (you might
only want nouns):
Note that I selected the Include radio button.
Once I've done all that, I click the GO button:
Here is what I get out:
or at least this is the start of the list. The CNC is the concreteness rating, CPOS is the part
of speech, and KFFRQ is the word frequency. Note that not all words have ratings. Let's
make sure we put out words that have both frequency and concreteness ratings. We can
set limits (but set them to be as big as we want) on the filter screen:
Now when we do this we get:
We can copy this to the clipboard and then paste it into excel. You may have to do textto-columns to get the different ratings in different columns. It helps if you don't copy the
header when you do this. Then you can sort on a ratings such as concreteness to find
words that are low and high concreteness.