Collection of body–object interaction ratings for 5,637 Japanese words

Body-object interaction (BOI)—the degree to which a person physically interacts with objects or entities—has been shown to affect language processing, although studies have reported inconsistent results depending on the language or context. Moreover, no large-scale BOI database exists for Japanese. To address this gap, we collected BOI ratings for 5,637 Japanese words from 1,267 native Japanese speakers. The ratings demonstrated notable levels of intra-item and inter-rater reliabilities and cross-linguistic validity. We further examined the relationship between BOI ratings and normative data from a lexical decision task for Japanese words. A hierarchical multiple regression analysis controlling for various lexical and semantic variables revealed that BOI was a significant predictor of lexical decision task performance. However, unlike the original BOI effect, higher BOI ratings were associated with longer response times and lower accuracy. This finding aligns with recent results from large-scale studies on BOI data collection, highlighting the need to reevaluate the impact of BOI on lexical processing.