Nomi ad alta e bassa “imagery”: classificazione di sostantivi in relazione al grado di evocazione di immagini mentali

This study was aimed to evaluate a list of 5083 Italian nouns in terms of high or low imagery. These words were obtained by a current dictionary of Italian language and underwent an assessment of their imagery characteristics by the same technique proposed by Paivio et al. in 1964. A five point scale was used where 1 indicated the absence or minimal strength of sensorial images associated with the presentations to 85 examiners of each word, while 5 indicated the maximum strength of those sensorial images. 1115 nouns were classified at high imagery, 221 at low imagery, and of all nouns included in the list, 3747 remained unclassified. No correlation was found between the imagery classification and a classification of frequency of use. These negative results confirm the lack of evidence of any relationship between imagery and other characteristics of words already described by Paivio.