To determine the semantic importance of certain features has been a topic of interest for many semantic memory models. Diverse measures have been proposed in the last years. Semantic significance, the latest measure proposed by Montefinese and colleagues, is both sophisticated and comprehensive. Given the cultural and linguistic variability of semantic measures, this study presents values of significance and relative weight for the Spanish-speaking population corresponding to 400 concrete concepts. First, we presented data for both young and older adults. Second, we assessed the effect of significance on response times in two speeded feature verification tasks. Third, we compared significance values with the existing Italian significance norms. To evaluate the effect of significance to predict response times, two speeded verification tasks (Experiment 1 and 2) were carried out, selecting a total of a 130 concepts for analysis. In Experiment 1, subjects were presented with a feature followed by a concept, while in Experiment 2, the order of stimulus presentation was reversed (i.e., the concept was presented before the feature). An independent linear mixed model showed that significance was a good predictor of response latencies in Experiments 1 and 2. Moreover, results revealed a strong positive correlation between the Spanish and Italian significance values. Findings are discussed in terms of recent theories of semantic cognition.

Familiarity, emotionality, motor activity, memorability, and vividness of visual imagery ratings, on 7-point scales, were collected for 536 Spanish action-related sentences, including a corpus of 439 phrases originally normed in Swedish, German, and Croatian (Arar & Molander, 1996; Molander & Arar, 1998; Molander, Arar, Mavrinac, & Janig, 1999) and 97 new sentences describing actions usually performed using different body postures and face or hand movements. These norms constitute the only available set of ratings for action sentences in Spanish including those dimensions to date, and they allow for the design of studies aimed at empirically exploring the relationship between action, language, and cognition with well-controlled materials in Spanish-speaking samples of participants.

An individual’s sense of the extent to which her or his body physically interacts with objects in the environment (body–object interaction; BOI) has been empirically shown to modulate lexical and semantic processing of object names. To allow for further exploration of the nature of those effects, BOI ratings for 750 Spanish nouns were obtained from 178 young adult participants. Statistical analyses showed moderate correlations between BOI indicators and some psycholinguistic indexes, such as word imageability and age of acquisition. In addition, an exploration of lexical associative relationships revealed that high-BOI words have a consistent tendency to be associated with words naming parts of the body. The ratings could be useful to researchers who are interested in manipulating or controlling for the effects of BOI in their language-processing studies. The complete norms are available for free downloading at Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/kd5vf/).