The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms: Multidimensional measures of Perceptual and Action Strength for 40,000 English words

Sensorimotor information plays a fundamental role in cognition. However, existing materials
that measure the sensorimotor basis to word meanings and concepts have been restricted in
sample size and breadth of sensorimotor experience. Here, we present norms of sensorimotor
strength for 39,707 concepts across six perceptual modalities (touch, hearing, smell, taste,
vision, and interoception) and five action effectors (mouth/throat, hand/arm, foot/leg, head
excluding mouth/throat, and torso), gathered from a total of 3,500 individual participants
using Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms are unique
and innovative in a number of respects: they represent the largest ever set of semantic norms
for English at 40 thousand words x 11 dimensions (plus several informative cross-dimensional variables); they extend perceptual strength norming to the new modality of
interoception; and they include the first norming of action strength across separate bodily
effectors. In the first study, we describe the data collection procedures, provide summary
descriptives of the dataset, and interpret the relations observed between sensorimotor
dimensions. We then report two further studies that i) extract an optimal single-variable
composite of the 11-dimension sensorimotor profile (Minkowski 3 strength), and ii)
demonstrate the utility of both perceptual and action strength in facilitating lexical decision
times and accuracy in two separate datasets. These norms provide a valuable resource to
researchers in diverse areas including psycholinguistics, grounded cognition, cognitive
semantics, knowledge representation, machine learning, and big data approaches to the
analysis of language and conceptual representations.