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The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on various aspects of society, including language and cognitive processes. This research investigates how the pandemic has influenced associations related to health-related words among 1,454 Estonian native speakers. Data collected between January and March 2023 were compared with a pre-pandemic dataset, the Dictionary of Estonian Word Associations (DEWA), compiled from 2016 to 2018. The study focuses on fifteen health-related cue words. The results revealed that five terms experienced significant changes in their association sequences concerning the COVID-19 crisis. Notably, among these 15 words, three stand out as the most significant cases where a change occurred in their primary responses: these typically exhibit the most robust and enduring associative links, making them less susceptible to change. This unveils shifts in the mental lexicon's representations and the evolving perceptions of specific words and concepts amidst the pandemic backdrop. These findings illustrate how unforeseen external disruptions, such as the COVID-19 crisis, can reconfigure the salience of certain concepts within language and cognition. This research contributes to our comprehension of the linguistic repercussions and potential language adaptations triggered by a health crisis. It also enriches the relatively understudied field of word association research, particularly in languages beyond the dominion of English.

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To what extent can the similarity structure of categories beinferred based on paradigmatic vs syntagmatic information?We explore this question in two studies that aim to captureparadigmatic information directly: first by having participantsgenerate near-neighbors to exemplars from 15 basic categories,and second by having them partially rank the most similar ex-emplars. After constructing neighborhood graphs of the itemsin each category, we derived a local measure (based on di-rect neighbors) and a global measure (including indirect pathsas well) of paradigmatic information. Both measures predictindependently-obtained human pairwise similarities for eachcategory, but incorporating indirect information substantiallyimproves this prediction. In a third study, we contrast thesemeasures with syntagmatic information obtained from a vast se-mantic network derived from 3 million judgments. The paradig-matic graphs are better predictors of similarity despite onlyencoding a fraction of these data. Broad implications for wordlearning and meaning are discussed.

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]

Copyright of Journal of Contemporary Educational Studies / Sodobna Pedagogika is the property of Association of Slovenian Educationalists and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines the developmental shift of response type through a qualitative study of word associations in Greek. In particular, it tests whether the associations produced by Greek speakers confirm findings of similar studies in other languages with respect to the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift. To this aim, a translated version of the Kent-Rosanoff test was administered to both adults and children who were native speakers of Greek. The findings of this study do not provide support for the concept of the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift, as they indicate a predominance of paradigmatic associations in children's responses and a majority of syntagmatic associations in adults' responses. The paper discusses the concept of the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift and suggests the need for further research in word associations in Greek but also in other languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]