Portuguese norms for ad hoc categories

Abstract

Scientific investigation on the organization of mental representations of categories has been showing, over the years, important new developments by focusing on the flexibility of these knowledge structures and its context dependency. Ad hoc categories are of particular use in this research domain because although their structures are hierarchically organized (as taxonomic categories are) they are, by definition, highly dependent on context and goals. Our study presents Portuguese norms for 63 lists of exemplars from different ad hoc categories. Two types of ad hoc categories are presented: 35 inter-categorical (composed of exemplars from different taxonomic categories), and 18 intra-categorical (composed of exemplars from the same taxonomic category). The present work further includes norms for 10 taxonomic categories, from which the intra-categorical ad hoc lists are derived. The categorical exemplars lists are presented with measures of production frequency, frequency of first production and production order average rank.