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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]

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.

Many theories of communication claim that perspective-taking is afundamental component of the successful design of utterances for aspecific audience. We investigated perspective-taking in aconstrained communication situation: Participants played a wordguessing game where each trial required them to communicate atarget word without context. In each game, pairs of participants tookturns giving and receiving clues to guess target words, bothreceiving feedback after each trial. In Experiment 1, none of themeasures of participants’ performance improved over rounds,suggesting either that participants were unable to improve theirperspective-taking or that the task was simply too demanding forother reasons. In Experiment 2, we tested whether this lack ofimprovement was due to overall difficulty rather than inability totake perspective. While the success rate in Experiment 2 didimprove over the course of the game, our analyses indicated that theimprovement was due to participants discovering a frequencyheuristic (using rarer clue words) rather than improved perspective-taking per se. The results of these two experiments show thatimproving perspective-taking adaptively is very difficult when thereis no context to ground either signal choice or interpretation.

Word associations are an important part of cognitive-linguistic and ethnolinguistic research on semantics. Associative responses to stimulus words provide important information about their lexical meaning. In cognitive studies, there is a vast interest in examining the connection between language and music. The aim of this research is to determine and compare the conceptualisations of music in the French and Serbian languages through the associative connection between the stimulus word music and the responses given by French and Serbian students. The conceptual organisation of the associative material will establish the extent to which the perception of music in the two observed linguacultural communities is specific, and the extent to which it expresses universal characteristics. The empirical material for the research was excerpted from two associative dictionaries of French and Serbian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The logistics industry is growing very rapidly. One of big industry in Indonesia is PT. Tiki Line Nugraha Ekakurir (JNE), which has been established for 29 years. This company has an extensive network in all cities in Indonesia, with service points of 1,500 locations. JNE has an application called my JNE on Google Play, which received more than 86,000 reviews and since December 2019 only got a rating of 2.4 stars out of a total rating of 5 stars. This study is obtained to analysis JNE user review data from Google Play. The reviews used in this study totaled 1,876 classified into positive and negative sentiment classes using the Naïve Bayes Classifier algorithm and word associations were also implemented. Classification with naïve bayes classifier with 90% training data and 10% test data had the best accuracy of 85.87%. Furthermore, for the text association, information is obtained that JNE users are talking about "send", "package", "courier", "good", "application", "fast", "service", "receive", "help", and "star". Whereas in the class of negative sentiment users often talk about "send", "package", "courier", "disappointed", "service", "service", "bad", "application", "severe", and "slow".

IntroductionWhat consumers say about food and what kind of words they use to do so offers direct insights into their perceptions, preferences, reasoning, and emotions.MethodsThis study explores evaluations of hybrid meat products of 2,405 consumers from England, Denmark, and Spain. As part of a large survey, consumers were prompted to note down four words that come to mind when they read a description of a hybrid meat product, and then again after they were involved in a hypothetical co-creation task of a hybrid meat product. 18,697 words and phrases of language material was processed using computational corpus-based analysis and manual classification into semantic categories including: Evaluation, Sensory, Production, Emotion, Diets, Quality, Ethics, and Other.ResultsConsumers consider many dimensions when it comes to the evaluation of hybrid meat products including ethical conduct and sustainability. For all three languages, the number of positive words increased and the number of negative words decreased significantly (p < 0.001) following the co-creation task, suggesting that consumers see such products very positively once they are more familiar with them and know more about the ingredients. Subcategories that received most words include: taste, ingredients, healthiness, naturalness, innovation, and environment, implying that these areas are of most importance when it comes to the evaluation of hybrid meat products. The concept of nutrition (especially words pointing to positive aspects such as “rich in vitamins”, “nutritious”) also rose significantly in use after co-creation.DiscussionThe study reveals consumers’ vocabulary of hybrid meat products across the three countries and offers important insights for food producers to help them create innovative products that better align with consumers’ perceptions and expectations.

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]

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Categorization is an essential cognitive activity to make sense of the world. Category-generating and word association studies help us elucidate how learners organize words in the mind. Categorization can indicate how learners acquire new vocabulary and how they use it to interpret reality. The present study analyses the word retrieval mechanisms of two groups of learners by looking into the word-pair associations produced as a response to a category-generation task. These associations in response to two semantic categories: countryside and animals were classified and scrutinized for shared patterns. Differences and similarities between semantic categories, and proficiency level of learners were explored. Results revealed learners favour coordination as the preferred mechanism for word attachment and retrieval, followed by event-based associations (metaphorical/contextual and experiential knowledge). Although frequencies vary significantly depending on L2 proficiency and semantic category, associational behaviours are comparable, with a preference for semantic associations over formal and presence of both taxonomic and thematic associations. The implications of these findings can reach the EFL classroom by informing which words to teach together and through which strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Trauma survivors are more likely than others to use cannabis, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) commonly co-occurs with cannabis use disorder (CUD). Automatic memory associations between trauma reminders and cannabis use have been suggested as contributing mechanisms. These associations can be studied experimentally by manipulating trauma cue exposure in a cue-reactivity paradigm (CRP) and examining effects on the accessibility of cannabis information in memory in trauma survivors with and without PTSD., Method: Cannabis users with trauma histories ( N = 202) completed a PTSD measure (PTSD Checklist-5) and were randomized to a trauma or neutral expressive writing task as an online CRP. Next, participants completed a cue-behavior word association task, which involved presentation of a series of ambiguous cue words to which participants provided the first word that came to mind. Some of these ambiguous cues pertained to cannabis (e.g., weed, pot ) and some to other substances (e.g., blow, shot ). This task was scored by two independent raters. Linear regression models tested the hypothesized main and interactive effects of CRP condition (trauma, neutral) and PTSD group (probable PTSD, no PTSD) on the number of cannabis and other substance responses generated., Results: Main effects of CRP condition were found for cannabis responses ( b = 0.41, p = .048; trauma > neutral) but not other substance responses. Unexpectedly, no main effects or interactions of PTSD group were observed for either outcome., Conclusions: In cannabis users with trauma histories, writing about one's trauma specifically activates greater accessibility of cannabis-related information in memory, regardless of PTSD., (© 2024 Authors et al.)

The present study contributes to the thematization of the UNESCO World Heritage Site Wadden Sea in biology didactics. Despite the uniqueness and high potential of the Wadden Sea ecosystem, especially for out-of-school learning, it has hardly been considered in biology didactics so far. The overall aim of this study is to gain insight into prospective biology teachers' existing conceptions regarding the Wadden Sea. Students are not only learners in their role at the university but prospective teachers as well due to their intended professional goal. Therefore, they can be considered the intersection of these two perspectives and are of particular interest to relevant research projects. In this paper, prospective biology teachers (n = 209, mean age 22.89 years) from Germany were surveyed using a word association test. Associations to the stimulus words Wadden Sea, mudflat hiking tour, tides, national park, and UNESCO World Heritage Site were collected. In the analysis, a category system was developed as literally as possible from the associations. This paper uses mind maps to provide a detailed overview of the identified associations. There was a wide range of identified associations: In addition to subject-area-related and subject-didactic associations, there were experience-oriented associations as well as associations unrelated to the subject. To place these results in context, secondary school students' associations to the same stimulus words are used for comparison. A central commonality is associations that encompass the experience possibilities at the Wadden Sea. In contrast to the secondary school students, the prospective teachers focus more on the school context. Conclusions are drawn regarding the education of biology teachers. In addition to identifying possible future research projects, this study suggests the need to consider the Wadden Sea in university teacher training.

Background: It has been suggested that mood influences the breadth of associated information available for retrieval, with positive mood broadening and negative mood constricting the scope of associations. In this study, we asked whether this mood-associations connection is related to controlled processes which were linked to clinical symptoms in depression.Methods: We used the semantic priming paradigm, which allows the dissociation of automatic and controlled processes by using short and long intervals between prime and target words. We further examined whether the strength of semantic relations (weak or strong) influence the priming effects in both neurotypical and depressed individuals.Results: Experiment 1, testing neurotypical individuals, showed priming effects for strong semantically-related words regardless of interval length, but priming effects for weak semantically-related words were smaller in short intervals than in long intervals. Experiment 2, testing depressed individuals in long intervals, showed smaller priming effects for weak semantically-related words than shown by neurotypicals, but priming effects for strong semantically-related words which were comparable between the groups.Limitations: This study cannot determine the source for the differences in priming effects between depressed individuals and neurotypicals, and further studies are needed.Conclusions: This is the first study to show priming impairments in depressed individuals. We discuss our results in light of leading theories concerning cognitive impairment in depression, as well as the newly emerged field of digital psychiatry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

S.A. Mednick (1962) proposed a theory of creativity suggesting that highly creative individuals can produce more word associations to a stimulus than less creative individuals. Numerous studies have supported this theory using the Remote Associates Test (RAT) as the measure of creativity. Additionally, some studies have suggested that high‐frequency words elicit more word associations overall than low‐frequency words, and concrete words elicit more associations overall than abstract words. The current study further investigated Mednick's theory by (a) creating controlled lists of stimuli that can better uncover how word type (abstract versus concrete) and word frequency (high versus low) affect the number of word associations produced to a stimulus, (b) including several creativity tasks besides the RAT, and (c) examining the role of other factors in creative thinking, including intelligence and verbal fluency. Participants first completed a word association task with four different types of words (i.e., high‐frequency concrete, low‐frequency concrete, high‐frequency abstract, and low‐frequency abstract), and then completed a variety of tasks, including several creativity tasks. Participants were categorized as highly creative or less creative based on a composite measure of the creativity tasks. Highly creative individuals produced more associations overall, supporting Mednick's theory. Furthermore, high‐frequency stimuli resulted in higher overall associative responses compared to low‐frequency stimuli, but contrary to previous research, no differences emerged for concrete versus abstract stimuli. There was also no difference in intelligence scores between the two creativity groups, and only a marginally significant difference in verbal fluency scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the word association method was applied in relation to municipalities in Eastern Hungary (Hajdú-Bihar county), where the Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan (SECAP) already exists, and where the SECAP has not yet been introduced. In addition to the six municipalities examined, Debrecen, a county seat with the SECAP, was also included in the survey. The aim was to explore the conceptual networks related to climate change and the strength of the relationship between the stimulus word and the associated concepts. The associations representing a common meaning were categorised. The results show that the distribution of conceptual networks and that of categories related to climate change exhibit a similar picture in the group of municipalities with (3 villages) and without the SECAP (3 villages), although significant differences were found when the settlements were examined separately (7 municipalities). Studying the distribution of categories by demographic groups, it was found that educational attainment determines, to the greatest extent, the answers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We perform a comparative study of the culturological characteristics of closely related languages through associative connexions which exist in the minds of their speakers and are registered in lexicographic sources. We examine the stimulus ‘bread’, which is one of the most important European and global culturally marked concepts. Our work addresses Bulgarian and Ukrainian in a broader comparison to Belarusian and Russian.

We examined word associations in Swedish children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) compared to their typically developing (TD) peers. Furthermore, the study aimed to explore the dimensions of vocabulary knowledge (breadth, depth, and fluency) in these children. Fifty children (15 DLD and 35 TD) participated in the study, aged six to nine years. This age span is commonly associated with substantial lexical reorganisation, by some referred to as the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift. Fifty items from the Kent-Rosanoff list were used to elicit word associations (say the first word that comes to mind). Word associations were coded as paradigmatic (lion-tiger), syntagmatic (chair-sit), phonological (moon-poon), and other/no answer (foot-hello/bed- -). A semantic depth score (paradigmatic and syntagmatic associations) was calculated and analysed. The children with DLD showed significantly lower semantic depth scores than their TD peers, in line with previous research in English-speaking children. However, the vocabulary dimensions were uniformly affected for the DLD group, contradicting previous findings of semantic depth as a particular area of weakness in this group. [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]

This study explores English for specific purposes learners' understanding of technical words in a previously-developed technical word list in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The principal aim was to estimate what kind of technical terms pose problems to TCM learners and might therefore merit special attention in instruction. Of particular interest was the question whether there is a divergence in the understanding of technical vocabulary in TCM between Chinese and Western background learners. To achieve these aims, a combination of word association tasks and retrospective interviews was implemented with 11 Chinese and 10 Western background TCM learners. The data showed that both Chinese and Western learners encountered certain difficulties in understanding technical vocabulary in their study. However, their sources of difficulty were different. Comparisons of typical word associations between Chinese and Western learners indicated that there was a degree of divergence in the way these two participant groups understood TCM terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents dictionaries of words associations, which are not frequently discussed in French linguistics. We introduce the base principles of word associations lexicology and the methodology used to build such dictionaries, then the results and their exploitation are explained. Those dictionaries are formed on psycholinguistic experiments where the first response to a given stimulus is fixed. There are two forms of dictionaries - the direct one, presenting the stimulus and all the obtained reactions in decreasing order of frequency, and the reverse one, where one can see every obtained reaction and all the stimuli that evoked it. Several experiments carried out over the past 15 years allow to present diatopic and diachronic variations in associative norms of French language.

This study investigates changes in children's environmental conceptions through their experience with the eco-animation WALL-E. The study uses an analytical framework informed by Social Representations Theory, accompanied with a word association approach to collect data. A total of 84 children (35 nine-year olds and 49 twelve-year olds) participated in the study. The animation reinforced both the idea of a polluted planet and the idea of the planet as an agent of life. The 9-year old participants expressed a more relational view of humans and nature than the 12-year olds. The process of anchoring new information to preexisting conceptual frameworks and the environmental views promoted through education are discussed as possible explanations of the ways participants interpret and assimilate environmental messages communicated by eco-animations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on the theoretical insights into the socio-cognitive approach to the study of interactions in which English is used as a lingua franca (ELF)), this paper reports on the idiosyncratic phenomenon that ELF speakers do not adhere to the norms of native speakers, but instead create their own particular word associations during the course of the interaction. Taking the verbs of speech talk, say, speak, and tell as examples, this study compares word associations from three corpora of native and non-native speakers. The findings of this study reveal that similar word associative patterns are produced and shared by ELF speech communities from different sociocultural backgrounds, and these differ substantially from those used by native English speakers. Idiom-like constructions such as say like, how to say, and speakin are developed and utilized by Asian and European ELF speakers. Based on these findings, this paper concludes that ELF speakers use the prefabricated expressions in the target language system only as references, and try to develop their own word associative patterns in ELF interactions. Moreover, the analysis of the non-literalness/metaphorical word associations of the verbs of speech in the Asian ELF corpus suggests that ELF speakers dynamically co-construct their shared common ground to derive non-literal/metaphorical meaning in actual situational context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aimed at describing word association and its function at the constituent understanding on the language learning. Word association is a relation between a word with other words because of the semantic relationship. A word association test appears when there is a stimulus word and someone mentions a response word that comes to mind firstly based on the stimulus word. The response words show someone's mental lexicon as a result of language acquisition and language learning. Word associations can be used in the process of understanding constituents (linguistic units) with word association tests, they are (1) words, (2) phrases, and (3) sentence patterns. In word constituent learning, word association tests are carried out by asking questions so that the result can show the semantic networks of words that are classified by word type. Phrase constituent learning is also held by asking questions, but response words are included before or after the stimulus word so that these words form a phrase. Meanwhile, sentence constituent learning is held by presenting words that are located as predicate and then asking questions that bring up the subject, object, complement, or additional information that accompany the predicate. With this method, students do not only learn constituents as units that have levels from small (words) to large ones (sentences), but also understand that constituents have a patterned and interconnected system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

The aim of this study was to determine the conceptual structures of exceptionally talented students about chemical change through the use of word associations. The study was conducted with 13 exceptionally talented students in seventh grade who were attending a science and art center located in a province in western Turkey. Data were collected with the help of a word association test (WAT) that involved eight concepts developed by the researchers and were analyzed qualitatively. The study comprised a pretest application of WAT, science activities, and a posttest. The results showed that the activities conducted improved the students' conceptual structures about chemical change. It might be recommended that such extracurricular activities be employed to support the development of the conceptual understanding of exceptionally talented students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large carnivores such as wolves and lynxes have recently been re-established in some regions of Central Europe. In Central Europe only, scattered information about public background knowledge exists, whereas in Scandinavia, perceptions and/or natural history knowledge about those nonhuman animals only were monitored occasionally. Determining associations with wolves and lynxes among young students therefore is an important subject and offers great support when planning educational interventions. An educational module was offered to a sample of 4th and 5th graders (n = 311), which involved individual observations of wolves and lynxes in Animal Ground enclosures of a National Park. Before, during, and after participation, word associations of the stimuli words "wolf" and "lynx" were collected from all students, indicating a negative impression of those animals before the intervention, especially of the wolf. Our intervention decreased this negative image and improved the background knowledge of these species. Recommendations are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Studies concerning emotional changes following brain damage neglect the emotional responses that might arise in reac - tion to the stimuli used in their examination of such pa tients. Yet those reactions may be quite forceful often provoking feeling of anxiety or panic and dismay. Material/Methods: A questionnaire designed to reveal associations and emotio - nal attitudes was presented to 96 extramural students. Four categories of products and the products within those categories were selected. The categories included: sweets, alcohol, transportation, and consumer electronics. In addition, 174 participants of various ages and professions produced associations linked to emotionally loaded words. Results: A list of associations and their dominance scores were created. It revealed that transportation (4.9) and consumer electronics (5) were given the highest mean scores. Also, the terms car (5.3) and mobile phone (5) aroused the highest levels of emotion. The significance of the emotional attitudes of the participants to objects were determined within particular dimensions that measured likableness, interest, goodness, and attractiveness. The terms beer, chocolate, car and mobile phone were reported to be most acceptable in all four dimensions. The above data suggests that the emotional at titude awakened by a particular object finds its expression in all of the dimensions examined. Conclusions:AThe studies revealed the significance of primary subconscious affects for creating positive or negative attitudes. This should be taken into account by therapists since objects which evoke a negative affect may trigger a patient's reluctance to take part in the rehabilitation procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One avenue for developing second language (L2) vocabulary knowledge is through Extensive Reading (ER). ER can provide opportunities for incidental learning to occur. Class time is often too restricted for sufficient attention to deliberate learning (Hunt & Beglar, 2005) meaning ER is important for L2 vocabulary development. This article builds on ideas in the recent two-part Reading in a Foreign Language ER discussion forum by investigating two implementations of ER and their effects on L2 vocabulary development: a traditional ER-only approach, and an ER-plus approach which supplements ER with postreading discussion implemented in small groups. L2 English learners enrolled at a university in Aotearoa New Zealand read five graded readers during normal class time. Latent Semantic Analysis was used to measure the development of word association knowledge of 60 target words. The findings revealed facilitative effects of both ER approaches. Supplementing ER with discussion provided opportunities for further development. [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]

In two studies we compare a distributional semantic model derived from word co-occurrences and a word association based model in their ability to predict properties that affect lexical processing. We focus on age of acquisition, concreteness, and three affective variables, namely valence, arousal, and dominance, since all these variables have been shown to be fundamental in word meaning. In both studies we use a model based on data obtained in a continued free word association task to predict these variables. In Study 1 we directly compare this model to a word co-occurrence model based on syntactic dependency relations to see which model is better at predicting the variables under scrutiny in Dutch. In Study 2 we replicate our findings in English and compare our results to those reported in the literature. In both studies we find the word association-based model fit to predict diverse word properties. Especially in the case of predicting affective word properties, we show that the association model is superior to the distributional model.

Similarity, which plays a key role in fields like cognitive science, psycholinguistics and natural language processing, is a broad and multifaceted concept. In this work we analyse how two approaches that belong to different perspectives, the corpus view and the psycholinguistic view, articulate similarity between verb senses in Spanish. Specifically, we compare the similarity between verb senses based on their argument structure, which is captured through semantic roles, with their similarity defined by word associations. We address the question of whether verb argument structure, which reflects the expression of the events, and word associations, which are related to the speakers' organization of the mental lexicon, shape similarity between verbs in a congruent manner, a topic which has not been explored previously. While we find significant correlations between verb sense similarities obtained from these two approaches, our findings also highlight some discrepancies between them and the importance of the degree of abstraction of the corpus annotation and psycholinguistic representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indirect tests of memory associations relevant to cannabis have been shown to be useful in explaining and predicting adolescent cannabis use habits. This study sought to increase the understanding of adolescent cannabis-related associative memory and cannabis use behavior over time. A longitudinal sample of alternative high school students (N = 775) was assessed yearly for 3 years. The study first conducted extensive longitudinal measurement analyses of the cannabis-related word association test (WAT) applying contemporary psychometric models. Second, the study examined the longitudinal trajectories of cannabis-related associative memory and cannabis use and their contemporaneous and longitudinal relationships. Results showed that the cannabis-related WAT provided strong evidence of sound psychometric properties. Longitudinal change in cannabis-related associative memory was best described by modeling either a linearly decreasing trajectory or two separate trajectories: During middle adolescence, levels of cannabis-related associative memory were highest and stable but then gradually decreased toward late adolescence. Moreover, cannabis-related associative memory was contemporaneously predictive of cannabis use within ages 15 to 19 while controlling for the underlying growth process of cannabis use and time-invariant covariates (TICs) of gender and lifetime concurrent use of alcohol and cigarettes. Partial support of longitudinal prediction of cannabis use was also obtained from age 17 to 18 and age 19 to 20 while adjusting for growth in cannabis use and the TICs. These results demonstrated that predictive effects of cannabis-related memory associations on cannabis use were detected within some of the 1-year age spans and were consistent within ages across adolescent years. [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]

The aim of work is to find out how self–control influences word associations. The research presented herein provides new insight into manifestations of self–control. Experimental study is based on the Strength model (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998), which assumes that self–control relies on limited resources of ego which become depleted with increased exercising of self–control (Ego depletion). The aim of this experiment was to verify in an empirical manner that the impairment of self–control can be manifested in word association tests. Continuous word association test (Kondáš, 1979) was used in this experiment. Distinct indicators of continuous word associations were divided into the following 4 categories; verbal dynamics, abnormalities in association, errors in the reproduction of association reactions and the overall number of mistakes. Parallel task and “e letter” crossing out exercises were used in order to impair ego resource.One–Way ANOVA was used in the analysis. The results of the study indicate that impaired self–control, induced by the “e letter” crossing out task, increased verbal dynamics. According to the obtained results, Continuous word association test provoke automatic processes. Further important indicators of impaired self–control were increased perseverations of potentially conflicting word ′control′, erroneous reproductions of potentially conflicting word ′explosions′ and the overall indicator of mistakes in conflict word‚ explosions and control‘. The experiment results show an increase in the number of mistakes of word association production when self–control is impaired.

The paper presents the project of a new lexicographic tool, the “Common Multilingual Dictionary of Bionyms”, led by a team of Russian linguists. In this dictionary we collect not only spontan associations and comparisons given for a noun (meaning an animal or a plant), but also phrases with this word and a definitions. The paper exposes the initial stage of the project, which begun in 2013 and will allow to complete lexicographic descriptions made by professionals with the results of the metalinguistic activity of naïve language users.

The paper presents the results of the evaluation of a university environmental course on pre-service teachers’ conceptions of environmental issues and environmental education. The evaluation method leaned on the theory of social representations and used stimulus terms to trigger respondents’ ideas. The course had a positive effect on participants’ conceptions, as it was indicated by the transformation of the conceptual framework for the stimulus terms. Our findings offered valuable insights for the proper transformation of the course while the easiness of the applied method in data collection, renders feasible the longitudinal monitoring of course effects.

Most words have a variety of senses that can be added, removed, or altered over time. Understanding how they change across different contexts and time periods is crucial for revealing the role of language in social and cultural evolution. In this study we aimed to explore the collective changes in the mental lexicon as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. We performed a large-scale word association experiment in Rioplatense Spanish. The data were obtained in December 2020, and compared with responses previously obtained from the Small World of Words database (SWOW-RP, Cabana et al., 2023). Three different word-association measures detected changes in a word's mental representation from Precovid to Covid. First, significantly more new associations appeared for a set of pandemic-related words. These new associations can be interpreted as incorporating new senses. For example, the word 'isolated' incorporated direct associations with 'coronavirus' and 'quarantine'. Second, when analyzing the distribution of responses, we observed a greater Kullback-Leibler divergence (i.e., relative entropy) between the Precovid and Covid periods for pandemic words. Thus, some words (e.g., 'protocol', or 'virtual') changed their overall association patterns due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, using semantic similarity analysis, we evaluated the changes between the Precovid and Covid periods for each cue word's nearest neighbors and the changes in their similarity to certain word senses. We found a larger diachronic difference for pandemic cues where polysemic words like 'immunity' or 'trial' increased their similarity to sanitary/health words during the Covid period. We propose that this novel methodology can be expanded to other scenarios of fast diachronic semantic changes., (© 2023 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.)