A total of 866 concrete concepts were selected for online norm completion. In selecting the concepts to be normed, we aimed to replicate the McRae norms as much as possible, and so we included all concepts from that set that were applicable to a British English environment (n = 490/541). We omitted concepts that are unfamiliar to Britons (e.g., cougar, chickadee, caribou, tomahawk). We selected additional items from the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980 (link)) pictures, from various other unnormed concrete concepts that we have used in previous studies, from items with high concreteness ratings (>550) in the MRC psycholinguistic database (Wilson, 1988 (link)), and from the category norms developed by Van Overschelde, Rawson, and Dunlosky (2004 (link)). One of the shortfalls of norms is the presence of unique and highly distinctive features that are not truly unique in the real world. Therefore, wherever possible, we tried to decrease the possibility of creating spurious unique properties by ensuring that all concepts had at least one other related concept in the list. For example, in the original McRae norms, the concept dandelion is the only flower and, therefore, has many unique features, including is a flower. We added other flowers (e.g., buttercup, daisy, sunflower, pansy) to accompany dandelion. Similar to McRae et al. (2005 (link)), we tried to avoid ambiguous concepts. Where the concept label was an ambiguous word, we provided a disambiguating term in parenthesis [e.g. “seal (animal)” and “organ (musical instrument)”]. There are 638 completed concepts in the current set, with data collection ongoing. A list of the concepts and their categories is included in the Appendix . These 638 concepts, their features, and feature variants constitute version 1 of the CSLB norms, available online at www.csl.psychol.cam.ac.uk/propertynorms . As additional concepts are completed, they will be incorporated into later versions of the norms, which will be made available on the Web site.
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