Department of
Psychological and Brain Sciences

The concrete-abstract categorization scheme has guided several research programs. A popular way to classify words into one of these categories is to calculate a word’s mean value in a Concreteness or Imageability rating scale. However, this procedure has several limitations. For instance, results can be highly distorted by outliers, ascribe differences among words when none may exist, and neglect rating trends in participants. We suggest using an alternative procedure to analyze rating scale data called median polish analysis (MPA).