Issues in Scaling Meaningfulness: Noble's Revised CVC Norms

While the writers feel that Noble's (1961) restandardization of 2100 CVCs is competent and potentially e~ctremely valuable, we believe that there are problems in evaluating the three types of scales he presents, and we have some reservations about the m' scale, which he apparently feels is the most justifiable of the three. A scale may be evaluated on the basis of (1) internal scaling criteria, (2) relation to other scales, and (3) relation to >erformance. Unfortunately, Noble restricts his interest almost exclusively to the first two. Noble's basic data for determining CVC norms are obtained from a five-point scale on which Ss rate (from None to Very Many) the number of associations they have to each CVC. Noble's a scale is simply the percentage of Ss rating any category but None. As he points out, this is equivalent to Glaze's scale of percentage of Ss having an association to a CVC. His d scale is the mean category checked for each item. His m' scale is a transformation of ratings to a Thurstone interval scale. Noble points out quite correctly that the a scale is relatively insensitive to differences between high association items. As his data show, cwo 100% association items on the a scale (i.e., no one checks the None category for either item) may have very different mean ratings on the a' scale. In terms of internal criteria, then, the a' scale seems preferable to the a scale. Noble's main rationale for use of successive intervals scaling is: (a) skewness of ratings and lower variances for items at the extremes of the rating scales, due presumably to restriction of range and (b) the hypothesized linear relation of m' with the average number of associations m, whish he takes as his basic definition of meaninnfulness. The successive intervals transformacion assumes a normal distribution for each item and adjusts the scale values accordingly, producing a scale with equal Z units. These assumptions are arbitrzry and to the writers' knowledge rest on no particular empirical or theoretical basis. [In fact, the m scale of paralogs (Noble, 1952) also exhibits skewness at the low end.] One might argue just as convincingly (and just as arbitrarily) that the skewness of extreme scores is a theoretically meaningful phenomenon. Thus, there appears to be no incontrovertable advantage to interval scaling in terms of eliminating skewness. The argument that m' is to be preferred to d because of its linear relation to m is also questionable. In the first place m is not a ratio scale of meaningfulness as is claimed in an earlier study (Noble, ct a/., 1957). The writers plorted the m values for a sample of 96 dissyllabic nouns and paralogs for two samples (Noble, 1952; Noble & Parker, 1960). This plot reveals that, although word rank-order remains essentially the same, m values do not differ only by a constant of proportionality as is required for ratio measurement. Second, the evidence for the hypothesized linear relation of rn' to m is based on a plot (Noble, 1961) of m' values for 100 CVCs against m values obtained by Mandler (1955). Examination of this scatter plot indicates so much variability that it is difficult to evaluate linearity. The writers believe that the exact method of scaling ratings such as Noble's should