scholarly journals Free word associations of children and adults

1966 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-58
Author(s):  
Joan Wertheim ◽  
P. James Geiwitz
Keyword(s):  
Word Associations ◽  
Free Word

scholarly journals Students’ Word Associations with Different Terms Related to the Wadden Sea: Does the Place of Residence (Coast or Inland) Have an Influence?

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 284
Author(s):  
Till Schmäing ◽  
Norbert Grotjohann
Keyword(s):  
Wadden Sea ◽  
Word Association ◽  
Place Of Residence ◽  
Word Associations ◽  
Quantitative Content ◽  
Visitation Frequency ◽  
Written Form ◽  
Free Word ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Out Of School

This paper presents students’ word associations with terms regarding the Wadden Sea. A continuous free word-association method was used in which the students from secondary schools (n = 3119, average age: 13.54 years) reported their associations with the stimulus words Wadden Sea, mudflat hiking tour, and tides in written form. Data were collected from students living close to the Wadden Sea and from students living inland. We performed a quantitative content analysis including the corresponding formation of categories. In addition, students’ school, out-of-school with the class, and private experiences the Wadden Sea ecosystem were recorded. The study shows that not only subject-related concepts should be considered at different levels, but non-subject-related aspects as well. The associations of the inland and non-inland students are statistically significantly different. The Wadden Sea and its biome were found to be completely unknown to some students. Students’ school, out-of-school with the class, and private experiences of the wetlands are also very mixed, regarding their Wadden Sea visitation frequency, and surprisingly cannot be directly derived from their place of residence. This research makes an important contribution towards the design of future biology didactic studies on the Wadden Sea.

Do word associations assess word knowledge? A comparison of L1 and L2, child and adult word associations

2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjolein Cremer ◽  
Daphne Dingshoff ◽  
Meike de Beer ◽  
Rob Schoonen
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Assessment Tool ◽  
Word Association ◽  
Word Knowledge ◽  
Word Associations ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
Association Behavior ◽  
Log Linear ◽  
L1 And L2 ◽  
Free Word

Differences in word associations between monolingual and bilingual speakers of Dutch can reflect differences in how well seemingly familiar words are known. In this (exploratory) study mono-and bilingual, child and adult free word associations were compared. Responses of children and of monolingual speakers were found to be more dispersed across response categories than responses of adults and of L2 speakers, respectively. Log linear analyses show that the distributional patterns of association responses differ among the groups. Age has the largest effect on association responses. Adults give more meaning-related responses than children. Child L1 speakers give more meaning-related responses than child L2 speakers. Form-based and ‘Other’ associations were mostly given by (L2) children. The different findings for mono- and bilingual children and for mono- and bilingual adults show the influence of bilingualism on the development of word associations. The prominent effect of age emphasizes the role of conceptual development in word association behavior, and makes free word association tasks less suitable as an assessment tool for word knowledge.

Relative Influence of Linguistic versus Cultural Factors on Free Verbal Associations

1968 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorand B. Szalay ◽  
Charles Windle
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
Cultural Factors ◽  
Relative Influence ◽  
Cultural Groups ◽  
Word Associations ◽  
Word Meanings ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Free Word

The extent to which differences in word associations between cultural groups are due to linguistic factors or to word meanings and values determined by culture was examined in the continued free word associations of Koreans in Korean and in English and a U. S. group in English. The influence of cultural background was at least as much as that of language on each of three characteristics examined. Further, much of the difference due to language seems to stem from the milieu of language acquisition.

Relationship between Two Measures of Verbal Relatedness: Preliminary Report

1965 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-18
Author(s):  
Bertram Garskof ◽  
George R. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Preliminary Report ◽  
Word Associations ◽  
Two Samples ◽  
Direct Association ◽  
Two Measures ◽  
Correction For Attenuation ◽  
Highly Correlated ◽  
Single Response ◽  
Free Word

Two measures of associative overlap between word pairs, the Mutual Relatedness Index (MR) and the Relatedness Coefficient (RC), computed from group single response free word associations and continued word associations from individual Ss, respectively, were computed from norms obtained from the same Ss for two samples of word pairs. The correlation between MR and RC for the two samples, was .540 and .504. With correction for attenuation, the correlation between MR and RC is .76. MR was highly correlated with direct association ( r = .88) while RC was not ( r = .43). It is tenable that MR and RC do not reflect the same aspects of verbal relatedness even though they are both considered measures of the associative overlap between a pair of words.

scholarly journals Word Co-occurrence in Child-directed Speech Predicts Children's Free Word Associations

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdellah Fourtassi
Keyword(s):  
Computational Linguistics ◽  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Strong Predictor ◽  
Free Association ◽  
Semantic Model ◽  
Word Associations ◽  
Association Task ◽  
Associative Behavior ◽  
Free Word ◽  
Large Corpus

The free association task has been very influential both in cognitive science and in computational linguistics. However, little research has been done to study how free associations develop in childhood. The current work focuses on the developmental hypothesis according to which free word associations emerge by mirroring the co-occurrence distribution of children's linguistic environment. I trained a distributional semantic model on a large corpus of child language and I tested if it could predict children's responses. The results largely supported the hypothesis: Co-occurrence-based similarity was a strong predictor of children's associative behavior even controlling for other possible predictors such as phonological similarity, word frequency, and word length. I discuss the findings in the light of theories of conceptual development.

Word Association: Capacity of Chronic Schizophrenics to Follow Formal Semantic, Syntactic, and Instructional Rules

1979 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 431-442 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy B. Mefferd
Keyword(s):  
Word Association ◽  
Response Patterns ◽  
Word Associations ◽  
Hospital Employees ◽  
Similar Word ◽  
Chronic Schizophrenics ◽  
Qualitative Nature ◽  
Associative Structures ◽  
Affective Dimensions ◽  
Free Word

Free word associations with pressure to respond fast were compared for actively psychotic, but tranquil, chronic schizophrenics of two categories and closely matched hospital employees. The stimulus words were homonyms that were equated among other factors for availability of responses in the various response tendencies characterized as idiodynamic sets, e.g., to define or explain the stimulus, or to give a syntactic response. Comprehensive scoring schema included separate semantic-syntactic, grammatical and affective dimensions. Qualitatively, the controls and schizophrenics had similar aberrant or faulting behavior, but the schizophrenics gave significantly more of three kinds of faults: (1) failure to “play the game or follow the instructions,” viz., no response, repeating the stimulus, or giving a multi-word; (2) mishearing the stimulus, i.e., a distant response to the intended stimulus but that is closely related to a phonetically similar word, and (3) distant experiential relationships, e.g., Pan-Knife. Expressed on the basis of percentage of scorable responses, the qualitative nature of the non-faulted response patterns of the controls and of either paranoid or simple chronic schizophrenics were indistinguishable. Schizophrenics had intact associative structures that appeared to be organized and used in the same way as with the controls.

Free Word Associations Correspond to Contiguities Between Words in Texts*

2005 ◽  
Vol 12 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 111-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manfred Wettler ◽  
Reinhard Rapp ◽  
Peter Sedlmeier
Keyword(s):  
Word Associations ◽  
Free Word

scholarly journals COMPLEX STRUCTURES AND SEMANTICS IN FREE WORD ASSOCIATION

2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (03n04) ◽  
pp. 1250054 ◽  
Author(s):  
PIETRO GRAVINO ◽  
VITO D. P. SERVEDIO ◽  
ALAIN BARRAT ◽  
VITTORIO LORETO
Keyword(s):  
Human Brain ◽  
Word Association ◽  
Semantic Network ◽  
Free Association ◽  
Small World ◽  
South Florida ◽  
Characteristic Scale ◽  
Property A ◽  
Word Associations ◽  
Free Word

We investigate the directed and weighted complex network of free word associations in which players write a word in response to another word given as input. We analyze in details two large datasets resulting from two very different experiments: On the one hand the massive multiplayer web-based Word Association Game known as Human Brain Cloud, and on the other hand the South Florida Free Association Norms experiment. In both cases, the networks of associations exhibit quite robust properties like the small world property, a slight assortativity and a strong asymmetry between in-degree and out-degree distributions. A particularly interesting result concerns the existence of a characteristic scale for the word association process, arguably related to specific conceptual contexts for each word. After mapping, the Human Brain Cloud network onto the WordNet semantics network, we point out the basic cognitive mechanisms underlying word associations when they are represented as paths in an underlying semantic network. We derive in particular an expression describing the growth of the HBC graph and we highlight the existence of a characteristic scale for the word association process.

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