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Association norms

المؤلف:  Paul Warren

المصدر:  Introducing Psycholinguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P49

2025-11-01

626

Association norms

Association norms are lists of the words that are evoked in the minds of native speakers when a target word is presented to them. These lists are a research tool that has proved useful for considering, amongst other things, the nature of the relationships between the words involved in speech errors, and they provide interesting information about the possible connections between words in the mental lexicon. Such norms are established by asking a large number of participants typically a hundred or more to write down or say the first word that comes to them when they are presented with the target word. Over the group of participants, a pat tern emerges, with some words more frequently given as responses than others. A set of examples from one such study is given in Table 3.2.

What we see from this small selection of targets and their most frequent responses is a range of associative relationships. Some are various types of opposite, such as high and low, long and short, white and black boy and girl, husband and wife, (a reciprocal opposite, looking at the same relationship from opposite perspectives), and possibly king and queen. Others are names of objects that you might expect to occur together in the same sentence, i.e. involve collocational links between words, such as between hammer and nail, butter and bread and some of the other pairings would also fall under this heading. The percentage figures in Table 3.2 reveal a range of strengths of the associative relationship. The responses here are all for the most popular ones to the given words, but range from 25 to 85.