Chinese Onomatopoeia Database (COD): Concreteness, imageability, age of acquisition, familiarity, semantic transparency, context availability, 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 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, age of acquisition (AoA), familiarity, semantic transparency, context availability, 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 normed reaction times (RTs) obtained based on two-character onomatopoeic words in a lexical decision experiment (N = 79), which showed that all COD variables significantly predicted lexical decision RTs, despite with varied predictive power. Further analyses with two measures, Zipf and logCD, from Chinese Children’s Lexicon of Written Words (CCLOWW) showed that these measures were significantly correlated with all COD variables. The inclusion of the Zipf measure in the regression models notably enhanced the predictability of lexical decision RTs. The establishment of the COD not only fills a crucial gap in psycholinguistic resource, but also provides a robust tool for future research into the cognitive and developmental underpinnings of language processing.