2.2. Stimuli

60 words (49 nouns, 11 verbs) were used from the kidBAWL (Sylvester et al., 2016), a validation for children of an adults’ word database including valence, arousal, and imageability ratings from 6 to 12 years old children to ensure the children’s familiarity with the words e.g., ‘holidays’ (positive), ‘beast’ (negative), and ‘battery’ (neutral). Twenty words were selected for each valence category (neutral, negative, positive, see supplementary material) matched for arousal, number of letters, and syllables. Word frequencies were taken from the childLex database (Schroeder et al., 2015) to ensure similar distributions over all three valence categories. For further details see Table 1 including relevant word features. The word valence which is based on former children’s ratings (Sylvester et al., 2016) was used for the data analyses. Words were presented auditorily to avoid potential effects of reading ability. Sylvester et al. (2016) showed that visual and auditory word presentation lead to equivalent behavioural results in valence ratings (see also Chee et al., 1999). Stimuli were spoken by a female computer voice (MAC OSX voice “Anna”). Each spoken word stimulus lasted 1 s.

Semantic and lexical variables of presented word stimuli.

Note. valence ratings z-transformed (scale −2.5 to 2.5) range for positive (r = 0.5–2.5), negative (−0.5 to −2.5) and neutral words (−0.5 to 0.5). Arousal ratings z-transformed (scale −2.5 to −2.5).