Emotional valence, cloze probability, and entropy: Completion norms for 403 French sentences.

Abstract

Sentence-final completion norms are a useful way to select materials in the study of psycholinguistics, neurosciences, and language processing. In recent decades, the literature has focused on measuring cloze probability and sentence constraint indexes to account for various contextual expectation effects. However, the emotional content of target words is another factor that may affect word prediction and has not yet been examined. The purpose of the present study was to design a French corpus of sentence completion norms for final words varying in both valence and arousal. A total of 1322 young adults participated in an online written cloze procedure, in which they were asked to guess the final missing word in given sentences. At least 275 individuals evaluated each sentence. Cloze probability index was estimated for each sentence ending with a negative, neutral or positive word, as well as the level of sentence uncertainty through the calculation of sentence entropy. We also estimated the emotionality of the beginning of each sentence as complementary information with valence and arousal values of sentence-ending words. The final corpus of 403 French sentences offers a wide range of cloze predictability contexts for all emotional categories of final words. We hope that these norms may help to implement new research investigating the interplay between language and emotional processing. The collected data and norms are accessible through the Open Science Framework at the following depository link: https://osf.io/7pc46/?view_only=a1ec1c23e28a45b9951c7cecc073e1ac.