New Zealand norms for a subset of Battig and Montague's (1969) categories

How people classify words has continued to be of interest in several areas of psychological enquiry. The development of category norms representing American adults' responses to 56 verbal categories (Battig and Montague, 1969) provided researchers with normative data that have been of considerable value in studies involving verbal behaviour. However, the validity of these norms, both with respect to research involving New Zealand subjects and to their relevance 25 years on, is the central issue addressed by the current investigation. Normative data are presented for 329 adult New Zealanders' responses to 10 common concrete categories (cf. Rosch, 1975), The data include the number of times each response was given within a category, the number of times each response was given first, and the mean rank of each response. The present data confirm the merits of having access to category norms from a New Zealand sample when undertaking research on verbal behaviour.