Ratings of name agreement and semantic categorization of 247 colored clipart pictures by young German children

Developmental and longitudinal studies with children increasingly use pictorial stimuli in cognitive, psychologic, and psycholinguistic research. To enhance validity and comparability within and across those studies, the use of normed pictures is recommended. Besides, creating picture sets and evaluating them in rating studies is very time consuming, in particular regarding samples of young children in which testing time is rather limited. As there is an increasing number of studies that investigate young German children's semantic language processing with colored clipart stimuli, this work provides a first set of 247 colored cliparts with ratings of German native speaking children aged 4 to 6 years. We assessed two central rating aspects of pictures: Name agreement (Do pictures elicit the intended name of an object?) and semantic categorization (Are objects classified as members of the intended semantic category?). Our ratings indicate that children are proficient in naming and even better in semantic categorization of objects, whereas both seems to improve with increasing age of young childhood. Finally, this paper discusses some features of pictorial objects that might be important for children's name agreement and semantic categorization and could be considered in future picture rating studies. •Picture stimuli must be rated for valid language, cognition, and perception research.•Rated data set of 247 colored cliparts for German speaking preschoolers•Ratings of name agreement and semantic categorization for 4- to 6-year-olds•Naming and categorization improve with growing age; categorization improves earlier.