Valence, arousal, concreteness, and humor norms for Singapore English concepts

Singapore English is a dialect of English spoken by individuals living in Singapore, whose colloquial form (i.e., Singapore Colloquial English) contains unique lexical items not found in dominant dialects of English. The absence of these items from the lexicon of dominant English dialects indicates that lexical-semantic norms central to psycholinguistic research do not exist for these Singapore English concepts. The present paper describes the development of lexical-semantic norms of valence, arousal, concreteness, and humor for a core vocabulary list of approximately 300 words and concepts. The contribution of these lexical-semantic norms to account for lexical processing performance was then evaluated in a visual lexical decision task containing a subset of items from the core list. Results indicated that valence, arousal, and concreteness explained additional variance over and above orthographic similarity and word frequency in the visual lexical decision task. Specifically, Singapore English words that were more positively valenced, highly arousing, and more concrete, were responded to more rapidly and accurately. Overall, this paper provides a case study of how psycholinguistic research can be extended to diverse, understudied dialects of English, and showcases how doing so offers an opportunity for psycholinguistics to examine the importance of various lexical-semantic measures to quantify lexical information in colloquial, informal language.