Perceptual Strength Norms for 510 Japanese Words, Including Ideophones: A Comparative Study with English

Words express various sensory information to various degrees. Norming studies have collected native speakers’ subjective perceptual strength ratings for numerous words in several languages. This paper presents perceptual strength norms for 510 Japanese words, including iconic lexemes called ideophones. The newly collected norms replicated some previous findings, such as visual dominance, olfactory inferiority, and the correlation between overall perceptual strength and iconicity. A systematic comparison between the Japanese and English perceptual strength norms further revealed that Japanese onomatopoeic ideophones tend to be more multisensory than their English equivalents and that Japanese words in general tend to encode more interoceptive information than English words. These findings suggest the usefulness of norming data in typological discussions on lexical semantics.