Properties of Categories in Semantic Memory

Abstract

Properties of categories were investigated by analyzing 22 measures of the 56 categories used in the 1969 Battig and Montague norms. A factor analysis of the data indicated that categories in semantic memory possess at least four factors that may affect the use and comprehension of categories. These factors were tentatively interpreted as reflecting the properties of category familiarity, category size, category-label printed frequency, and a category's semantic complexity. Additionally, the correlation matrix and the factorpattern matrix allow many insights into other semantic properties, such as meaningfullness, abstract-concreteness, and homographic characteristics of category labels.