NEW-ZEALAND NORMS FOR A SUBSET OF BATTIG AND MONTAGUE (1969) CATEGORIES

How people classify words has continued to be of interest in several a reas of psychological enquiry. The development of category norms repre senting American adults' responses to 56 verbal categories (Battig and Montague, 1969) provided researchers with normative data that have be en of considerable value in studies involving verbal behaviour. Howeve r, the validity of these norms, both with respect to research involvin g New Zealand subjects and to their relevance 25 years on, is the cent ral issue addressed by the current investigation. Normative data are p resented for 329 adult New Zealanders' responses to 10 common concrete categories (cf. Rosch, 1975), The data include the number of times ea ch response was given within a category, the number of times each resp onse was given first, and the mean rank of each response. The present data confirm the merits of having access to category norms from a New Zealand sample when undertaking research on verbal behaviour.