Chinese Onomatopoeia Database (COD): Concreteness, imageability, context availability, age of acquisition, familiarity, semantic transparency, emotional valence, and emotional arousal for Chinese onomatopoeic words

While numerous lexical databases provide rating norms for a wide range of words, resources for onomatopoeia remain scarce. Given the pivotal role of onomatopoeia in language development and its potential insights for the relationship between word phonology and word meaning, we introduce the Chinese Onomatopoeia Database (COD), comprising 97 one-character, 380 two-character, 91 three-character, and 183 four-character onomatopoeic words in Chinese (total N = 751). All words were rated by 311 native Chinese speakers for concreteness, imageability, context availability, age of acquisition (AoA), familiarity, semantic transparency, emotional valence, and emotional arousal. We demonstrated high reliability across these measures through Cronbach's alpha, split-half coefficients, and intra-class correlation coefficients (ICCs). Correlation analyses revealed significant associations among these lexical variables, including those between semantic and affective variables. Predictive validity of these variables was also examined using reaction times (RTs) and accuracy (ACC) obtained based on a lexical decision task, which showed that COD variables significantly predicted lexical decision RTs and ACC. Further analyses with two measures, Zipf and logCD, from the Chinese Children's Lexicon of Written Words (CCLOWW; Li et al., 2023) showed that these measures were significantly correlated with all COD variables. Even with the inclusion of CCLOWW-based Zipf or logCD measures in regression models, the COD-based variable still significantly predicted both RTs and ACC. The establishment of the COD not only fills a crucial gap in psycholinguistic resources but also provides a robust tool for future research into the cognitive and developmental underpinnings of language processing.