2.3 Procedure

Ethics permission for this study was granted by the Ethics Assessment Committee Humanities at Radboud University Nijmegen. Before beginning the survey, participants were informed about the purpose of the study and gave informed consent. When starting the survey, participants received the following instruction (in their own language): “In this survey, you will be asked to type all the words you know for different categories. For example, if you see the category “vehicles”, you might respond with “car, train, bus, truck” etc.” After this, participants responded to a practice category (fruits) to get familiar with the procedure. We did not examine this data. After the practice category, participants received the following instructions: “There are 3 more categories coming up. For each category, you will have 3 minutes to list as many examples as you can.” Then the three categories, “the landscape”, “body parts” and “animals” appeared one after the other, in random order. For each category, the term appeared at the top of the screen without any further instructions. A counter was also displayed, counting down from three minutes. Participants typed their responses into separate text boxes for each exemplar.

The data was pre-processed in the following manner: all upper-case letters were changed to lower case to allow comparison of strings (note for example that in German all nouns are capitalized, but that typically in tasks such as free listing this capitalization may be neglected). Obvious spelling mistakes and typos were corrected. Alternative spellings of the same word were unified, as well as singular and plural forms of the same word, and the same word with and without articles.