Development of a database of five-letter hiragana anagrams

Abstract

The anagram task is widely used in psychological research as a manipulation of independent and dependent variables. The purposes of this study were to develop a database of anagrams and to clarify the relationship between material word characteristics and the difficulty of an anagram. We developed 147 five-letter hiragana anagrams and tested them on 39 university students. In the experiment, we measured the rate of correct answers within 3 minutes, solution time, and subjective difficulty as indices of task difficulty, as well as familiarity, imageability, and emotional valence as word characteristics. We found significant correlations between task difficulty indices and word characteristics; specifically, increasing word characteristic ratings indicated decreasing difficulty of the anagrams. The data from this study could be used to choose anagrams for psychological experiments, and as a guideline to modulate difficulty when developing other anagrams.