Affective and Psycholinguistic Matching in German-English Words: Norms for Valence, Arousal, Word Frequency and Length for 40 Word Pairs

This study presents a tightly matched stimulus set varying in valence (positive/negative) and arousal (high/low), based on selected words from two affective databases: the Affective Norms for English Words (Bradley & Lang, 1999), and its German adaptation, the Affective Norms for German Sentiment Terms (Schmidtke et al., 2014). Forty German-English word pairs were matched pairwise on valence, arousal, word frequency (words per million) and word length (letters), and listwise to ensure equivalence across affective categories. Finally, a subset of the items was newly validated by a sample of English speakers to ensure the validity of the norms in a contemporary context. Correlations show that stimulus set was closely matched across valence (r =.94), arousal (r = .92), frequency (r = .97) and length (r =.83). The stimulus set, including both affective and psycholinguistic data is provided online for future use with bilingual speakers.