Sentence-final word completion norms for European Portuguese children and adolescents

This study presents a set of sentence contexts and their cloze probabilities for European Portuguese children
and adolescents. Seventy-three sentence contexts (35 low- and 38 high-constraint sentence stems) were presented
to 90 children and 102 adolescents. Participants were asked to complete the sentence contexts with the
first word that came to mind. For each sentence context, responses were listed and cloze probabilities of the
words that were chosen to complete the sentence context were computed. Additionally, idiosyncratic and invalid
responses (structural and semantic errors) were analyzed. A high degree of consistency in responses among the
two age samples (children and adolescents) was found, along with a decrease of idiosyncratic and invalid responses
in older participants. These results shed light on age-related changes in the effects of linguistic context
on word production, and also in knowledge’s representation. The full set of norms may be downloaded from
http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental
This study was funded by a doctoral grant (SFRH/BD/35882/2007)
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)