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.

A number of properties of word associations, generated in a continuous task, were investigated First, we investigated the correspondence of word class in association cues and responses. Nouns were the modal word class response, regardless of the word class of the cue, indicating a dominant paradigmatic response style. Next, the word association data were used to build an associative network to investigate the centrality of nodes. The study of node centrality showed that central nodes in the network tended to be highly frequent and acquired early. Small-world properties of the association network were investigated and compared with a large English association network (Steyvers & Tenenbaum, 2005). Networks based on a multiple association procedure showed small-world properties despite being denser than networks based on a discrete task. Finally, a semantic taxonomy was used to investigate the composition of semantic types in association responses. The majority of responses were thematically related situation responses and entity responses referring to parts, shape, or color. Since the association task required multiple responses per cue, the interaction between generation position and semantic role could be investigated and discussed in the framework of recent theories of natural concept representations (Barsalou, Santos, Simmons, & Wilson, in press).

In two experiments, we examined whether word age-of-acquisition (AoA) is a reliable predictor of processing times in semantic tasks. In the ®rst task, participants were asked to say the ®rst associate that came to mind when they saw a stimulus word; the second task involved a semantic categorisation between words with a de®nable meaning and ®rst names. In both tasks, there were signi®cantly faster responses to earlier-acquired than to later-acquired words. On the basis of these results, we argue that age-of-acquisition eects do not originate solely from the speech output system, but from the semantic system as well. Ó

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 multipleresponse 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 singleresponse 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.Keywords Word associations . Semantic network . Lexical decision . Semantic relatedness . Lexical centrality Associative knowledge is a central component in many accounts of recall, recognition, and semantic representations in word processing. There are multiple ways to tap into this knowledge, but word associations are considered to be the most direct route for gaining insight into our semantic knowledge (Nelson, McEvoy, & Schreiber, 2004;Mollin, 2009) and human thought in general (Deese, 1965). The type of information produced by word associations is capable of expressing any kind of semantic relationship between words. Because of this flexibility, networks are considered the natural representation of word associations, where nodes correspond to lexicalized concepts and links indicate semantic or lexical relationships between two nodes. These networks correspond to an idealized localist representation of our mental lexical network. The properties derived from such a network have been instrumental in three different research traditions, which will be described below. These traditions have focused on (1) direct association strength, (2) second-order strength and distributional similarity, and (3) network topology and centrality measures.The first tradition has used word associations to calculate a measure of associative strength and was inspired by a behaviorist view of language in terms of stimulus-response patterns. This notion of associative strength plays an important role in studies that have focused on inhibition and facilitation in list learning (e.g., Roediger & Neely, 1982), studies on episodic memory (e.g., Nelson et al., 2004), and studies that have tried to distinguish semantic and associative priming (for a recent over...