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Investigating how infants first establish relationships between words is a necessary step towards understanding how an interconnected network of semantic relationships develops in the adult lexical-semantic system. Stimuli selection for these child studies is critical since words must be both familiar and highly imageable. However, there has been a reliance on adult word association norms to inform stimuli selection in English infant studies to date, as no resource currently exists for child-specific word associations. We present three experiments that explore the strength of word–word relationships in 3-year-olds. Experiment 1 collected children's word associations (WA) (N = 150; female = 84, L1 = British English) and compared them to adult associative norms (Moss & Older, 1996; Nelson et al., 2004 (Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36(3), 402–407)). Experiment 2 replicated WAs from Experiment 1 in an online adaptation of the task (N = 24: 13 female, L1 = British English). Both experiments indicated a high proportion of child-specific WAs not represented in adult norms (Moss & Older, 1996; Nelson et al., 2004 (Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36(3), 402–407)). Experiment 3 tested noun–noun WAs from these responses in an online semantic priming study (N = 40: 19 female, L1 = British English) and found that association type modulated priming (F(2.57, 100.1) = 13.13, p <. 0001, generalized η2 =.19). This research presents a resource of child-specific imageable noun–noun word pair stimuli suitable for testing young children in word recognition and semantic priming studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the age of information deluge, it is pivotal to have access to information or knowledge which is not just relevant but also, novel. Knowledge workers often have to skim through tens or even hundreds of abstracts or articles to identify those novel documents which can enhance their knowledge. While there are personalized recommenders which can provide relevant documents to these knowledge workers, there aren't many systems which can identify 'novel' documents which are relevant. Critical roadblocks in the discovery of novel documents are big, labelled datasets and complex, expensive infrastructure for training models. This work attempts to overcome these roadblocks by proposing an unsupervised classifier based on word associations to predict the novelty of a document based on its content. Evaluation based on a benchmarking dataset TAP-DLND 1.0 has revealed that, the performance of this classifier is comparable to that of many of the state-of-the-art supervised learning techniques including some of the deep learning models. The results can have potential implications in the way NLP researchers approach novelty detection in documents by not having to rely on large, labelled training datasets which are scarce! [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How words are associated within the linguistic environment conveys semantic content; however, different contexts induce different linguistic patterns. For instance, it is well known that adults speak differently to children than to other adults. We present results from a new word association study in which adult participants were instructed to produce either unconstrained or child-oriented responses to each cue, where cues included 672 nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other word forms from the McArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI; Fenson et al., 2006). Child-oriented responses consisted of higher frequency words with fewer letters, earlier ages of acquisition, and higher contextual diversity. Furthermore, the correlations among the responses generated for each pair of cues differed between unconstrained (adult-oriented) and child-oriented responses, suggesting that child-oriented associations imply different semantic structure. A comparison of growth models guided by a semantic network structure revealed that child-oriented associations are more predictive of early lexical growth. Additionally, relative to a growth model based on a corpus of naturalistic child-directed speech, the child-oriented associations explain added unique variance to lexical growth. Thus, these new child-oriented word association norms provide novel insight into the semantic context of young children and early lexical development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, word associations have played a key role in cognitive research. The goal of this study is to propose a new system called Tarvajeh to construct and analyze the association norms found in the Persian language. In this paper, we present Tarvajeh, a data set for Persian words in a continuous word association task. For data collection, cue words have been categorized into groups and then, 30 of them were presented to each participant in two phases. Afterward, the participants were asked to write the first three words that are related to the initial cue words. After data collection, Tarvajeh included 240 frequent Persian cues and more than 20,000 different responses. Furthermore, we also propose a method that allows participants to compare their responses as well as their subconscious mind with those of their peers using a unique graph that is tailored to their responses and is displayed to them. Finally, we compared our data with those of associated words in other languages. The comparison reveals that, for some cues, most associated words are the same, while for others, the most frequent responses are unique within each data set. In addition, some gender-related differences were observed with male participants spending more time on their responses than female participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents results from a study exploring representations of "happiness" and "unhappiness." Word associations with these concepts were produced by 16–18 and 29–34-year-old women from Finland, the country that the United Nation's World Happiness Report has ranked the "happiest" in the world. Correspondence Analysis (CA) and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis show that participants in both age groups share three clusters of words associated with "happiness": Tangible happiness, Affective happiness and Serene happiness. We noted more differences in the associations with "unhappiness," for which the two groups share only two clusters: Loss and Everyday problems. A distinct third cluster, Affective unhappiness, emerged for the younger women, whereas older women's associations are further differentiated into a more complex structure, including two more clusters: Dejection and Apprehension. Additionally, CA shows that in both age groups, self-reported happiness levels do not discriminate which words are associated with happiness and unhappiness. Finally, qualitative content analysis of a questionnaire item investigating how to reach complete happiness suggested that there are three recurring answer types: happiness can be improved through external changes, internal changes, or not at all because complete/permanent happiness does not exist. The study provides a methodological design which, unlike most happiness studies, allows participants the freedom to bring up the meaning of happiness and unhappiness. Thus, the study constitutes a contribution to a more nuanced understanding of happiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word associations have been used widely in psychology, but the validity of their application strongly depends on the number of cues included in the study and the extent to which they probe all associations known by an individual. In this work, we address both issues by introducing a new English word association dataset. We describe the collection of word associations for over 12,000 cue words, currently the largest such English-language resource in the world. Our procedure allowed subjects to provide multiple responses for each cue, which permits us to measure weak associations. We evaluate the utility of the dataset in several different contexts, including lexical decision and semantic categorization. We also show that measures based on a mechanism of spreading activation derived from this new resource are highly predictive of direct judgments of similarity. Finally, a comparison with existing English word association sets further highlights systematic improvements provided through these new norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates the patterns of word associations among Arab EFL learners and compares these patterns with those of native speakers of English. The study also examines the influence of increased language exposure and word characteristics on the learners' association patterns. To this end, 45 native speakers of English and 421 Arab learners of English at a Saudi university with two distinct levels of English language exposure completed a multiple-response word association test and their responses were analyzed, examined and compared. The results revealed strong influence for language exposure and word characteristics on the learners' associations and support a developmental approach to the second language lexicon where an increase in language exposure and word knowledge enhances mental word connectivity and increases its native-like similarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word ratings on affective dimensions are an important tool in psycholinguistic research. Traditionally, they are obtained by asking participants to rate words on each dimension, a time-consuming procedure. As such, there has been some interest in computationally generating norms, by extrapolating words' affective ratings using their semantic similarity to words for which these values are already known. So far, most attempts have derived similarity from word co-occurrence in text corpora. In the current paper, we obtain similarity from word association data. We use these similarity ratings to predict the valence, arousal, and dominance of 14,000 Dutch words with the help of two extrapolation methods: Orientation towards Paradigm Words and k-Nearest Neighbors. The resulting estimates show very high correlations with human ratings when using Orientation towards Paradigm Words, and even higher correlations when using k-Nearest Neighbors. We discuss possible theoretical accounts of our results and compare our findings with previous attempts at computationally generating affective norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synesthesia is a neuropsychological condition in which stimulation of one sensory modality or cognitive pathway is associated with unusual experiences in a different unstimulated modality. In this context a purpose of this study is to find relationships between word-color associations and psychopathological symptoms of anxiety (SAS), depression (BDI-II), alexithymia (TAS-20) and symptoms of traumatic stress (TSC-40) in 43 healthy young women (mean age 18.25). Results of this study show that colors associated to specific words have significant correlations with symptoms of anxiety, depression, alexithymia and symptoms of traumatic stress. Sum of scores related to color associations to these words create subscales that are significantly correlated with BDI-II (Spearman R= -0.60), SAS (-0.44), TAS-20 (-0.70) and TSC-40 (-0.64); p<0.01. The results indicate specific synesthetic-like mechanisms in association processes specifically linked to psychopathological thinking, feelings and imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several sources of interference may simultaneously affect the onset of the well-known 'Stroop effect.' Among them is the semantic component, which is reflected in the gradient or semantic effect. This effect consists of an increase in the amount of interference as the semantic distance between the word and the color concept decreases. Shepard (Science 237:1317-1323, ) relates psychological space, measured through multidimensional scaling, to mean response times. The present investigation aims to study the function relating the semantic gradient with the psychological distance between the word and the color in a Stroop task. After measuring the gradient, we obtained the subjective rating of the degree of dissimilarity of the gradient words with the concept of 'color.' In our work, we show that the amount of interference in a Stroop task increases when the semantic distance from the word to the color concept decreases, and it does so exponentially. We replicated the study with different stimuli to test the robustness of the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food has become a prominent object of everyday moral discussions. This study examines how gender, political orientation, and country of origin are connected to moral foundation endorsement in food-related moral thinking. Respondents were university students ( N = 371) from Finland, Denmark, and Italy who completed a word association task, in that given stimulus words were ' ethical food' and ' unethical food.' Results showed a presence of five moral foundations in the data, and indicated high prevalence of the Purity/Sanctity foundation in food-related moral thinking. As expected, gender differences emerged in the endorsement of the Fairness/Reciprocity and the Purity/Sanctity foundations. Also, between-country differences emerged in four of the five moral foundations, indicating that even within Europe countries may differ from each other in their endorsement of foundations. The results also verified the previously found effect of political orientation in three of the five moral foundations, although the study used a completely new and different type of method compared with previous studies. The study concludes by proposing more cross-national comparative studies where the focus is on the specific objects of moral thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we describe the most extensive set of word associations collected to date. The database contains over 12,000 cue words for which more than 70,000 participants generated three responses in a multiple-response free association task. The goal of this study was (1) to create a semantic network that covers a large part of the human lexicon, (2) to investigate the implications of a multiple-response procedure by deriving a weighted directed network, and (3) to show how measures of centrality and relatedness derived from this network predict both lexical access in a lexical decision task and semantic relatedness in similarity judgment tasks. First, our results show that the multiple-response procedure results in a more heterogeneous set of responses, which lead to better predictions of lexical access and semantic relatedness than do single-response procedures. Second, the directed nature of the network leads to a decomposition of centrality that primarily depends on the number of incoming links or in-degree of each node, rather than its set size or number of outgoing links. Both studies indicate that adequate representation formats and sufficiently rich data derived from word associations represent a valuable type of information in both lexical and semantic processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An abnormal facilitation of the spreading activation within semantic networks is thought to underlie schizophrenics' remote associations and referential ideas. In normal subjects, elevated magical ideation (MI) has also been associated with a style of thinking similar to that of schizotypal subjects. We thus wondered whether normal subjects with a higher MI score would judge “loose associations” as being more closely related than do subjects with a lower MI score. In two experiments, we investigated whether judgments of the semantic distance between stimulus words varied as a function of MI. In the first experiment, random word pairs of two word classes, animals and fruits, were presented. Subjects had to judge the semantic distance between word pairs. In the second experiment, sets of three words were presented, consisting of a pair of indirectly related, or unrelated nouns plus a third noun. Subjects had to judge the semantic distance of the third noun to the word pair. The results of both experiments showed that higher MI subjects considered unrelated words as more closely associated than did lower MI subjects. We conjecture that for normal subjects high on MI “loose associations” may not be loose after all. We also note that the tendency to link uncommon, nonobvious, percepts may not only be the basis of paranormal and paranoid ideas of reference, but also a prerequisite of creative thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]