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List Task and a Cognitive Salience Index

Urmas Sutrop
Field Methods 2001 13: 263
DOI: 10.1177/1525822X0101300303

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FIELD METHODS
Sutrop / LIST TASK AND COGNITIVE SALIENCE INDEX

List Task and a Cognitive Salience Index

URMAS SUTROP
Institute of the Estonian Language

The list task and its two parameters (term frequency and its mean position in the lists)
are discussed here. A new simple cognitive salience index, S = F/(N mP), that com-
bines the two list task parameters is presented together with the procedure for its cal-
culation. The cognitive salience index is normed to vary between 1 and 0. The basic
terms in every domain are the most salient. The salience index of the ideal most
salient term has the figure 1 and that of the term not mentioned at all the value is 0.
The cognitive salience index gives comparable results between different investiga-
tions, as it does not depend on the length of the individual lists. The cognitive salience
index is compared with some earlier salience indices.

In this article, I introduce a new cognitive salience index that combines two
list task parameters. Then, I discuss the earlier free-list salience indices pro-
posed by Smith (1993; Smith et al. 1995; Smith and Borgatti 1997) and an
earlier cognitive salience index (Sutrop 1998, 2000), and compare them with
my new cognitive salience index. I briefly discuss the list task and its two
parameters (term frequency and its mean position in the lists). Finally, I give
a short procedure to calculate the cognitive salience index and draw some
conclusions.

1
LIST TASK

Under the term list task, I place written or oral interviews in anthropology,
linguistics, psychology, or other social sciences. The format of the list task is,
“Please list all Xs that you know.” If the interviews are conducted in the writ-
ten form, then the question is, “Please write down all Xs that you know.” You
can use this form only if the subjects are literate. In the case of oral interviews
(both with literate and illiterate subjects), you should ask, “Please name all Xs
that you know.”

This article was read at the International Conference on Cognitive Typology, Antwerp, Belgium,
12–14 April 2000. I thank professors Frans Plank, University of Konstanz, Germany; J. Jerome
Smith, University of South Florida; and Jüri Allik, University of Tartu, Estonia for their help. I
also thank three anonymous reviewers for their useful remarks.
Field Methods, Vol. 13, No. 3, August 2001 263–276
© 2001 Sage Publications
263

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264 FIELD METHODS

For instance, you can ask, “Please name all colors that you know,” “Please
write down all animals that you know,” or “Please name everything that you
can sense with your nose.” Such descriptive phrases as in the last example (X
= everything that you can sense with your nose) are needed when the domain
is small or the cover term denotes a cultural or cognitive domain and is, at the
same time, a member of that domain.
Let us now compare the color and smell terms. We can see that the word
color is (in many but not all languages) a cover term that denotes a concrete
domain but is not a member of that domain. In many languages, the term
smell denotes a concrete domain and is, at the same time, its member. It is not
obligatory for well-established domains to have a name. For example, it is
widely known that many Turkic languages have an extremely sophisticated
nomenclature for horses (depending on their sex, age, color, etc.), but the
generic term horse is absent in these languages.
If we restrict the interviews (both oral and written) temporally, for
instance, to two or five minutes, then we are using a restricted list task. If
there is no temporal limit (i.e., the interviewer asks, “Please name all Xs that
you know,” and after the informant stops listing Xs the interviewer asks, “Do
you know more Xs?”), we describe it as a free-list task. In most cases, this dis-
tinction between restricted and free-list tasks is irrelevant. So, we can simply
use the name list task. The list task techniques are described by Weller and
Romney (1988), Weller (1998), and Borgatti (1999).

TERM FREQUENCY PARAMETER

The next important consideration concerning the list task is the purpose of
the study. If the only intention, for example, of an anthropologist, linguist, or
psychologist is to define certain cultural or cognitive domains, then we need
only one list task parameter—term frequency—to establish a domain. Here,
we need a precondition that a sufficient number of interviews are held. It is
generally accepted that twenty–thirty subjects are needed as a minimum
(Weller and Romney 1988:14; Borgatti 1999:122–30). For example, Davies
and Corbett (1994) held seventy-seven interviews to establish the basic color
terms in Russian. I conducted eighty interviews when investigating color,
smell, taste, and temperature terms in Estonian (Sutrop 1998, 2000,
forthcoming).
With a sufficient number of subjects, we can use the term frequency
parameter quite safely. The terms that are listed only by a single informant or
by very few subjects must be considered as accidental/occasional terms.
Borgatti (1999:125) gives three rules to determine a domain boundary: (1)

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 Sutrop / LIST TASK AND COGNITIVE SALIENCE INDEX 265

Include all items mentioned by more than one respondent, (2) look for a natu-
ral break (in the distribution of terms frequency) or grouping, and (3) define a
boundary arbitrarily. Actually, there are only two rules, because the first is a
special case of the third: One decides arbitrarily that all items mentioned by
more than one respondent should be included.
A rule of thumb here is: If the number of subjects is small (twenty), delete
the terms that are mentioned only by one informant, but if the number of sub-
jects is greater (e.g., fifty–eighty), delete the terms mentioned by only three
or fewer subjects.
The rationale for deleting the low-frequency terms from a domain is the
following: Only terms that are in active use (in that language) are listed with a
high frequency. The low-frequency terms are either in passive use or are used
only in some idiolects. Of course, a domain defined by deleting low-fre-
quency terms (arbitrarily or according to a natural break or grouping) con-
tains many passive terms. For that reason, the second list task parameter, the
mean position of a term, is also important for defining the terms in active use
in a domain.

MEAN POSITION OF A TERM

The mean position of a term is calculated only from individual lists con-
taining that term. It is generally accepted that there is a good correlation
between the frequency and mean rank of a term (i.e., the most frequent terms
are named first and the terms that are named only by a few subjects are named
last) (Bousfield and Barclay 1950). For that reason, the mean rank can be
ignored in a list task if you only want to define the boundaries of a domain.
Actual data show that the correlation between the frequency and mean
rank of a term is not ideal. For example, in my study of the temperature terms
used in the Estonian language, the terms kõrge (high) and madal (low) were
both named at a low frequency by nine subjects out of eighty, but the mean
position of the term high was one, while it was four for the term low. In both
cases, the high mean position shows that if these terms were named at all,
they were named among the first. This anomaly could be explained by the
reflection of school physics on everyday language—all temperatures are
divided into high and low degrees (Sutrop 1998:93).
For a linguistic anthropologist, it is not enough to define only the borders
of a domain. He or she needs more detailed knowledge about the internal
structure of that domain. He or she may ask which are the basic and nonbasic
terms in that domain.2 Other possible applications of the list task data
(co-occurrences of the terms, multidimensional scaling, dichotomous cate-

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266 FIELD METHODS

gory bias, clustering, etc.) are described by Borgatti (1999:126–31) and Rob-
bins and Nolan (1997, 2000).
If you want to establish (cognitively) the basic terms in a domain (in most
cases these are morphologically simple, short, and native words), you need
some objective criteria for ordering the terms and discriminating the salient
group of basic terms from the nonbasic ones. The frequency measure or the
mean position of a term alone is not sufficient. Both measures give different
sets of candidates for the basic status. For that reason, it seems, the frequency
and mean position of a term could be combined into a cognitive salience
index.

COGNITIVE SALIENCE INDEX

Borgatti (1999:123) is rather skeptical when he writes that “in recognition

that frequency and average rank [i.e., mean position] are both reflections of
the same underlying property (i.e., salience), some researchers like to com-
bine the two into a single measure.” In the following analysis I will show that
there are no grounds for sharing this skepticism.
When I started my fieldwork in Estonia collecting sense perception terms,
I used the field method of Davies and Corbett (1994, 1995) for establishing
the basic color terms. This method consists of two parts: (1) Subjects do the
list task (please name as many colors as you know) and (2) they do the
tile-naming task (every subject is shown sixty-five color tiles in a random
order and asked to name the color of each tile). The color list task and the
color-naming task gave similar results.
There are no standard stimuli available that could represent sense percep-
tion terms as precisely as color terms (e.g., the way in which color tiles
defined in color space represent colors). For that reason, I expanded the list
task methodology to senses other than color. I conducted eighty interviews
for each domain and collected a corpus of color, smell, taste, and temperature
terms. For each term, I calculated two parameters according to the list task
protocol—its frequency and mean position (Davies and Corbett 1994, 1995).
I realized that these parameters corresponded to the criteria of psychologi-
cal salience in the definition of the basic color term. Berlin and Kay (1969:6),
defining the basic color term, wrote that indices of psychological salience
included, among others, (1) a tendency to occur at the beginning of the elic-
ited lists of color terms, (2) stability of reference across subjects and across
occasion of use, and (3) occurrence in the idiolects of all subjects.
I combined the first and third indices into one cognitive salient index: The
tendency to occur at the beginning of elicited lists of terms corresponds to the

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 Sutrop / LIST TASK AND COGNITIVE SALIENCE INDEX 267

mean position of a term, and the occurrence of a term in all idiolects of all
subjects corresponds to the frequency of that term.
A cognitive salience index shows the psychological salience in the list
task combining the frequency and mean position of a term into one parame-
ter. Salience (S) is a fraction:
S = F/(N mP).

The dividend considers the frequency (F) with which a term is named in
the list task. The divisor N mP considers the weight of the mean position (mP)
in which the term is named, and N is the number of subjects. If all subjects
have named a term (F = N) and the mean position of that term is 1, then the
salience (S) is also 1 for that term.
The cognitive salience index is normed to vary between 1 and 0. The basic
terms in every domain are the most salient. The salience index of the most
ideally salient term has the figure 1. Terms that tend to be named last and with
a low frequency have a value declining toward 0. The term that is not men-
tioned at all has the salience 0. The cognitive salience index gives compara-
ble results between different investigations, as it does not depend on the
length of the individual lists.
Frequency, mean position, and the integral cognitive salience index are all
good criteria for discriminating basic terms from nonbasic ones. Sometimes
the discrimination must also be made between more and less basic terms. In
such cases, certain linguistic criteria can well be applied.

DISCUSSION

There is an earlier salience index in linguistic and anthropological litera-

ture. Smith has independently developed a free-list salience index. In that
index, the two list task parameters—frequency and mean position—are also
integrated into one integral parameter—the free-list salience index (Smith
1993; Smith et al. 1995; Smith and Borgatti 1997).
In his first article devoted to the free-list salience index, Smith (1993) pro-
posed the following formula for his index:
free-list salience index of an item =
sum of the item’s percentile ranks/total number of lists
a percentile rank = ((count – sequence)/count) 100.

If the total number of lists is N, count is the length of a list Li, and sequence
is the rank of a term Rj in that list Li, then we get the following formula for the

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268 FIELD METHODS

free-list salience index of an item Sj instead of the verbal formula given by

Smith (1993):
Sj = (Σ(((Li – Rj)/Li)100))/N.

Smith gives the first term in a list sequence 0, the second term 1, and so
forth. An ideal term that is named by all subjects and always first has a value
Sj = 100%, because
S1 = (Σ(((Li – 0)/Li)100))/N = 100%.

The sequence of the last term in a list has the rank Rj = count – 1 = Li – 1. It
follows that the term that is always named last has a value declining toward 0:
Sj = L = (Σ(((Li – (Li – 1))/Li)100))/N = (Σ((1/Li)100))/N > 0%.

In an article dedicated to the free-list salience index, Smith et al. (1995)

applied this index to the domain analysis of English color terms. Here, the
formula for calculating the free-list salience index is also given verbally:

The free-list salience index ranges from 0 to 1, with higher figures denoting
higher salience. For a given term in a given list in which it occurs (ranged
according to its order of appearance in that list), an index score is calculated as
follows:
term index score = (list-length term rank) × (1/(list length – 1))
The term’s index score for each list in which it occurs is thus calculated. A
term’s mean score across all lists (even those in which the term does not
appear) is its free-list salience index. (P. 206)

Smith comments on this description of his index in a later article:

“Through a series of almost comical errors (for which the senior author takes
full responsibility) a recent . . . article on English color terms inaccurately
described a measure of free-list-item salience” (Smith and Borgatti
1997:208). Nevertheless, it is possible to understand this description and
present a formula by correcting a small misprint in the term index score,
which should be read
term index score = (list-length SUBTRACT term rank) × (1/(list length – 1)).

If the total number of lists is N, the length of a list is Li, and the rank of a
term in a list Li is Rj, then we get the following formula for the free-list
salience index of an item Sj instead of the verbal formulas given by Smith
(1993):

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 Sutrop / LIST TASK AND COGNITIVE SALIENCE INDEX 269

term index score = (Li – Rj)(1/(Li – 1)) = (Li – Rj)/(Li – 1).

As a term’s mean score across all lists (even those in which the term does
not appear) is its free-list salience index, the index Sj for a term is
Sj = (Σ((Li – Rj)/(Li – 1)))/N.

An ideal term that is named by all subjects and always first has the value
S1 = 1, for
S1 = Σ((Li – 1)/(Li – 1))/N = 1.

The term that is always named last has the value Sj = L = 0, for
Sj = L = Σ((Li – Li)/(Li – 1))/N = 0.

In their next article, “Salience Counts—and So Does Accuracy,” Smith

and Borgatti (1997) tried to correct the errors in the descriptive formula dis-
cussed above (Smith et al. 1995). They assigned the value 0 (Sø = 0) arbi-
trarily to the terms that did not appear at all (Smith and Borgatti 1997:209).
This corresponds to the procedure described by Smith (1993), where the term
that was always named last declined toward 0 but still remained greater than
0. Thus, the value 0 is “the extreme case being a phantom item that was never
mentioned in any list at all” (Smith 1993:1). In both cases, this is different
from an earlier version of the free-list salient index, where the term that was
always named last in every list got the value 0 (Smith et al. 1995).
Smith and Borgatti (1997) presented their new formula where L is the
length of (number of items in) a list, Rj is the rank of item j in the list (first = 1),
and N is the number of lists in the sample:
S = ((Σ(L – Rj + 1))/L)/N.

As L is the length of a sample, we may give it the index i (Li) and the for-
mula changes into
S = ((Σ(Li – Rj + 1))/Li)/N.

Now we can see that the corrected formula also contains an error. First, we
must add up the individual scores and after that divide the sum by an indexed
length of a list (Li). Such a division makes no sense. For that reason, the
parentheses in the formula must be changed to make the formula work:
S = (Σ((Li – Rj + 1)/Li))/N.

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270 FIELD METHODS

Earlier, I have suggested a cognitive salience index where salience (S) is a

product of two factors (Sutrop 1998, 2000):
S = (F/N) [(L – mP)/(L – 1)].

The first factor, F/N, considers the frequency (F) with which a term is
named in the list task and N is the number of subjects. If all subjects have
named a term, then this factor is 1 for that term. The second factor, (L – mP)/
(L – 1), considers the weight of the mean position (mP) in which the term is
named; L is a parameter that takes into account the length of the lists (L is the
mean length of the individual lists). If the mean position is 1, this factor is
also 1.
The ideal basic term that is psychologically most salient has the value 1 for
both factors, so the product S would also be 1. If the mean position (mP) mea-
sure for some term is equal to the mean length of the list (L) (i.e., mP = L),
then the value for our salience index S = 0; and if the mean position of a term
is greater than the mean length of the individual lists, then the salience index
has a negative value (S < 0).
This cognitive salience index gives the cognitively salient terms positive
figures and the nonsalient terms negative figures. The turning point between
them is a term named as a mean, which is equal with the mean length of the
lists. The cognitive salience index structures the cultural or cognitive domain
according to the salience of the terms in that domain.
I abandon this index here for two reasons. First, the index works only if we
exclude from our sample all the terms mentioned only by a few subjects.
Without doing so, the terms that are named only by one subject at the end of
some lists (mP > L) would give better results than the terms named by two or
three subjects. Second, and this applies to the indices proposed by Smith and
his colleagues as well, the results depend on the length of the lists (i.e., short
and long lists give different results). This causes difficulties in interpreting
the results in a concrete investigation or in the comparison the results of dif-
ferent works done by different researchers.
The cognitive salience index introduced here is different from the free-list
salience index. The free-list salience index is calculated on the basis of indi-
vidual lists, whereas the cognitive salience index for a term is calculated from
its frequency and mean position according to the formula:
S = F/(N mP).

The cognitive salience index structures the cultural or cognitive domain

according to the salience of the terms in that domain. First, we may discrimi-
nate our domain according to the frequency measure excluding all terms with

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 Sutrop / LIST TASK AND COGNITIVE SALIENCE INDEX 271

an extremely low frequency. An ideal psychologically most salient term has

the figure 1. We can also assume that the salient terms with greater figures are
in active use. The terms that have very small figures (as well as the terms that
were already excluded because they had an extremely low frequency) are in
passive use. One can assign the value 0 (if necessary) for the terms that did
not appear at all in the list task. (It is also true algebraically, if we use our for-
mula: If the dividend F is 0, the quotient is also 0; we must assume that the
mean position (mP) of a term not mentioned at all is not 0, but infinite.)
There is no reason to be skeptical about the cognitive salience index. If our
task is to find out only the borders of some cultural or cognitive domain, com-
puting the cognitive salience index is not necessary. The frequency measure
does it well in the list task. Linguistic anthropologists, psychologists, cogni-
tive scientists, and other social scientists need the cognitive salience index to
order the terms in a domain according to their salience and structure the
domain into salient and nonsalient terms. To illustrate how the cognitive
salience index works, I present some of my results on smell and color terms in
the Estonian language (Sutrop 2000, forthcoming). I also compare the results
of the smell list task with my earlier salience index and with the free-list
salience index (according to the corrected formula above).
There were eighty subjects doing the smell term and color term list tasks.
The domain of smell terms is very small in most languages. In the smell term
list task, subjects were asked to name everything that they can sense with
their nose. The subjects named only 33 different terms; every subject listed
3.60 smell terms on the average. Only 7 terms were mentioned by four or
more subjects. The only basic term in this domain is the term lõhn (smell) in
Estonian (see Table 1).
The free-list salience index and the cognitive salience index give much the
same results. The most frequent terms behave quite similarly, but not the
low-frequency terms. That is because the free-list salience index depends on
the length of the individual lists. For instance, the low-frequency terms vine
(stink) and odöör (perfume) have the same rank of free-list salience, but dif-
ferent ranks of cognitive salience. Both terms were named twice (F = 2): vine
as the third term of five and as the last (fifth) term; the mean position of that
term is four (mP = 4.00). Odöör was also named twice (F = 2): as the eighth
term of ten and as the third term of four (mP = 5.50). The cognitive salience
for those terms that have the same frequency but different mean positions is
dissimilar, but the free-list salience is the same. This is the side effect of the
length of the individual lists when we use the free-list salience index.
My earlier index depends also on the length of the individual lists because
the salience depends on the mean length of the individual lists. This gives an
unexpectedly low rank of salience, for example, for the term parfüüm. On the

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272 FIELD METHODS

TABLE 1
The List Task Results of the Smell Terms of Estonian

Name Gloss F R mP R eS R S R flS R

lõhn smell 80 1 1.08 2 0.969 1 0.9259 1 0.9846 1

hais stink 73 2 2.74 10 0.302 2 0.3330 2 0.4818 2
aroom aroma 42 3 2.57 9 0.210 3 0.2043 3 0.3148 3
lehk stench 36 4 3.47 12 0.111 4 0.1297 4 0.1837 4
parfüüm perfume 9 5 3.89 13 –0.013 29 0.0289 5 0.0477 5
õhk air 2 12.5 1.00 1 0.025 5 0.0250 6 0.0250 8
hõng breath 5 7 3.00 11 0.014 7 0.0208 7 0.0308 7
ving reek 7 6 4.29 23 –0.023 32 0.0204 8 0.0335 6
tuul wind 2 12.5 2.00 4.5 0.015 6 0.0125 9 0.0208 9
[...]
vine stink 2 12.5 4.00 18 –0.004 20 0.0063 15.5 0.0100 17
odöör perfume 2 12.5 5.50 28 –0.018 31 0.0045 19 0.0100 17
toss reek 1 25 4.00 18 –0.002 15.5 0.0031 22.5 0.0088 19
[...]
NOTE: F = frequency, R = rank, mP = mean position, eS = earlier salience index, S = salience
index, and flS = free-list salience index. The basic term appears in italics.

other hand, it gives a higher rank of salience to the term nohu (nasal catarrh),
which was named only once as the fourth term (mP = 4), than it gives to the
term vine (stink), which was named twice (mP = 4).
As we have seen, we should prefer the new simple cognitive salience
index, which is based on two cognitively important parameters (the term fre-
quency and its mean position) and is free from the side effects that depend on
the length of individual lists like the earlier cognitive index and the free-list
salience index. The new cognitive salience index works also with small sam-
ples or small number of subjects. In contrast, the old formula that depends on
the length of the individual lists does not. A sufficient number of subjects is
needed for calculating the old cognitive salience index from the list task data.
This abandoned index gives good results only when we eliminate the
low-frequency terms (i.e., those named only by a few subjects).
The domain of colors is very large in Estonian. In the list task, eighty sub-
jects named 285 different color terms (most were compounds and modified
terms; actually, 638 different color names were named in the list and
color-naming tasks). The mean length of an individual list was 18.94 terms.
In the list task, 71 color terms were named by four or more subjects. Table 2
shows the most salient color terms (the basic terms are printed in italics). The
cognitive salience index makes a clear cut between the basic terms and the
highest nonbasic terms. The basic term gray has the salience rank 11 and the
highest nonbasic term beige has the salience rank 12.

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 Sutrop / LIST TASK AND COGNITIVE SALIENCE INDEX 273

TABLE 2
The List Task Results of the Color Terms of Estonian

Term Gloss F R mP R S R

sinine blue 71 2 3.66 1 0.242 1

punane red 71 2 4.46 2 0.199 2
roheline green 69 4.5 5.75 3 0.150 3
kollane yellow 71 2 6.07 4 0.146 4
must black 69 4.5 7.13 5 0.121 5
valge white 66 7 7.74 6 0.107 6
oranz orange 68 6 9.79 13 0.087 7
lilla lilac, purple 58 9 8.82 9 0.082 8
pruun brown 52 11.5 9.71 12 0.067 9
roosa rose, pink 53 10 11.24 19 0.059 10
hall gray 64 8 13.80 31 0.058 11
beez* beige 52 11.5 11.44 21 0.057 12
hele-sinine light blue 28 13 7.82 7 0.045 13
tume-sinine dark blue 22 14.5 9.90 14 0.028 14
violetne violet, purple 15 19 8.73 8 0.021 15
[...]
NOTE: F = frequency, R = rank, mP = mean position, and S = salience. The eleven basic color
terms of Estonian appear in italics.

The free-list salience index behaves differently. In their article on English

color terms, Smith et al. (1995) applied their index to the color term list task.
In that study, the nonbasic English term violet has the salience rank 11, and
the basic term gray has the salience rank 12. This shows that the cognitive
salience index makes a better cut between the basic and nonbasic terms.

PROCEDURE
1. One should register the terms exactly in the order the terms were named in the
list task.
2. One should calculate the mean position of a term (mP) from the list task
results:
F is the frequency of a term (i.e., F is the number of the lists where a term is
listed),
N is the total number of the lists (subjects), and
Rj is the rank of a term in an individual list.
The frequency of a term that does not appear at all in the lists is 0 (Fø = 0) and
the mean position of that term is infinite (mPø = ∞).
2.1. The mean position of a term can be calculated as follows:

mP = (Σ Rj)/F.

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274 FIELD METHODS

3. Finally, one can calculate the cognitive salience index for an item (S):

S = F/(N mP).
3.1. For practical reasons, one can calculate the cognitive salience index for
an item (S) also from the formula:

S = F2/(N Σ Rj).
I suggest conducting at least twenty–thirty interviews to calculate the cogni-
tive salience index from the list task data.

CONCLUSIONS

List tasks can be divided into oral or written tasks and restricted (with time
limits) or unrestricted tasks. One can combine two list task parameters (the
frequency of a term and its mean position in the lists where it was named) into
a salience index. A cognitive salience index and a procedure for its calcula-
tion is proposed:
S = F/(N mP).

The cognitive salience index takes into account two cognitively important
parameters: the term frequency and its mean position. The mean position of a
term corresponds to its tendency to occur at the beginning of elicited lists of
terms, while the frequency of that term corresponds to the occurrence of the
term in the idiolects of all subjects.
The third parameter is the number of subjects in the study. For anthropolo-
gists, linguists, and other social scientists who do not feel comfortable with
mathematical formulas, such presentation is psychologically more accept-
able because they can combine two real measures (frequency and mean posi-
tion) into an integral parameter.
The cognitive salience index is free from the side effects caused by the
length of individual lists. This makes the results of every investigation com-
parable with every other. The cognitive salience index structures the given
cultural or cognitive domain. The basic terms in every domain are the most
salient. The most salient term, the one that is always named first by all sub-
jects, has the figure 1, while the terms in active use produce greater figures
and the passive terms in the domain produce smaller figures. The less salient
terms have a value declining toward 0. The terms that do not appear at all get
the value 0 in the list task.

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 Sutrop / LIST TASK AND COGNITIVE SALIENCE INDEX 275

NOTES

1. I use the term list task (Davies and Corbett 1994, 1995; Sutrop 1998, 2000, forthcoming)
synonymously with terms such as free list (Smith 1993), free-list (Smith et al. 1995), free-recall
listing (Weller 1998), free listing (Weller and Romney 1988; Trotter and Schensul 1998), free
listing task (Robbins and Nolan 1997), free-listing (Robbins and Nolan 2000), freelist (Borgatti
1999), or Lenneberg’s Approach A in a study of the color terms (Lenneberg 1967:339–40, 345),
associative responses (Bousfield and Sedgewick 1944), and so forth.
2. I define basic term in the tradition in which Berlin and Kay (1969:5–7) defined basic color
terms:

A basic term is a psychologically salient, in most cases morphologically simple and

native word, which belongs to the same word class and has the same grammatical poten-
tial as the prototypical member(s) of its domain. It is a term that generally denotes an
object, a quality, or a phenomenon at the basic level, and which is applicable in all rele-
vant situations. (see Sutrop 1998:61, forthcoming)

REFERENCES

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updating a measure for free-list-item salience. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 7 (2):
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———. 2000. The basic colour terms of Estonian. Trames 4 (1): 143–68.
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URMAS SUTROP, director of the Institute of the Estonian Language, Tallinn, Estonia,
has a diploma in biology (University of Tartu, Estonia) and a Ph.D. in general linguistics
(1998) from the University of Konstanz, Germany. His research interests include
ethnolinguistics, lexicology, historical linguistics, theonyms, and Finno-Ugric lan-
guages. Recent publications include “Temperature Terms in the Baltic Area” (1999) in
Estonian: Typological Studies III, Tartu; “Basic Terms and Basic Vocabulary” (2000)
in Estonian: Typological Studies IV, Tartu; “From the ‘Language Family Tree’ to the
‘Tangled Web of Languages’ ” (2000) in C9IFU, Tartu; and “Umwelt—Word and Con-
cept: Two Hundred Years of Semantic Change” (2001) in a special issue of Semiotica
about Jakob von Uexküll.

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