A retrospective study of stimulus variables in word association

Brown, W. P.

doi:10.1016/s0022-5371(71)80034-8

Cited by 7 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…al. 2016, taking a mesoscopic approach, have shown that WA networks can be used to generate norms for valence, dominance, and arousal which correlate to a high degree with human judgements of affective strength; reviews by Cramer (1968) and Brown (1971) offer further examples of the influence of affective variables. The last of the findings in the list above implies that words with strong semantic profiles (e.g.…”

Section: Concretenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Word association research and the L2 lexicon

Fitzpatrick

Thwaites

2020

Lang. Teach.

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Since its modern inception in the late nineteenth century, research on word associations has developed into a large and diverse area of study, including work with both applied linguistic and psycholinguistic orientations. However, despite significant recent interest in the use of word association to investigate second language (L2) vocabulary knowledge and testing, there has until now been no systematic attempt to review the wider word association research tradition for the benefit of L2-oriented researchers and practitioners. This paper seeks to address this, drawing together linguistic research from the past 150 years, with a focus on research published since 2000. We evaluate the current state of L2 word association research, before identifying methodological and theoretical themes from a broader range of disciplinary approaches. Emerging from this, new paradigms are identified which have potential to catalyse a new phase of work for second language word association scholars, and which indicate priority foci for future work.

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Section: Concretenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Word association research and the L2 lexicon

Fitzpatrick

Thwaites

2020

Lang. Teach.

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“…The word association task is assumed to re¯ect conceptual processing (De Groot, 1989). More speci-®cally, the retrieval of word meanings seems to be involved in word association, as (monolingual) performance on this task was found to be in¯uenced by the concreteness of stimulus words (e.g., Brown, 1971;De Groot, 1989), as well as by their meaningfulness or affectivity/emotionality (e.g., Cramer, 1968). For example, using the discrete and continued word association task, De Groot (1989) found that concrete words elicited faster, and a higher number of, associative responses than abstract words.…”

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confidence: 99%

Conceptual representation in bilingual memory: Effects of concreteness and cognate status in word association

1998

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A word association experiment examined conceptual representation in bilingual memory. Dutch-English bilinguals associated twice to nouns and verbs that varied on concreteness and cognate status, once in the language of the stimuli (within-language), and once in the other language (between-language). Within- and between-language associations for concrete words and for cognates were more often translations of one another than those for abstract words and noncognates, and nouns evoked more translations than verbs. In both within- and between-language association, retrieving an associate was easier to concrete than to abstract words, to cognates than to noncognates, and to nouns than to verbs. These findings suggest that conceptual representation in bilingual memory depends on word-type and grammatical class: concrete translations, cognates, and noun translations more often share, or share larger parts of, a conceptual representation than abstract translations, noncognates, and verb translations. The results are discussed within the framework of distributed memory representation.

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“…For words that possess approximately one meaning per form, ratings of meaning frequency correlated highly with objective frequency measures, as one would expect. The second set of analyses found that semantic factors had no greater correlations with ratings of meaning frequency than they did with objective frequency counts, although these same semantic factors often affect word associations (Brown, 1971;Cattell, 1889Cattell, /1947Cramer, 1968;de Groot, 1989). The final set of analyses compared ratings of meaning frequency and associative dominance as measures ofmeaning dominance for ambiguous words (i.e., which meaning of ball or week/weak is more common).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Earlier studies have found strong effects of semantic factors, such as concreteness, on word association lateneies and the number ofassociates generated (Brown, 1971;Cattell, 1889Cattell, /1947Cramer, 1968;de Groot, 1989). These researchers have also noted the ability of such semantic factors to mask or eliminate frequency effects in word associations.…”

Section: The Influence Of Semantic Factors On Ratingsmentioning

confidence: 96%

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Frequency of meaning use for ambiguous and unambiguous words

Griffin

1999

Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers

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When using verbal stimuli, researchers usually equate words on frequency ofuse. However, for some ambiguous words (e.g., ball as a round object or a formal dance), frequency counts fail to distinguish how often a particular meaning is used. This study evaluates the use of ratings to estimate meaning frequency.Analyses show that ratings correlate highlywith word frequency counts when orthographie and meaning frequencies should converge, are not unduly influenced by semantic factors, and may provide a better measure ofrelative meaning dominance than the word association task does. Furthermore, the ratings allow researchers to equate or manipulate frequency of meaning use for ambiguous and unambiguous words. Ratings for 211 words are reported.Lexically ambiguous words are widely used in psycholinguistic research. In word recognition studies, homonyms,' such as (baseball and vampire) bat, have been used to study context and frequency-of-meaning effects in lexical access (for a review, see Simpson, 1984Simpson, , 1994, number-of-meanings effects (e.g., Millis & Button, 1989;Rubenstein, Garfield, & Millikan, 1970), summation of priming (Balota & Paul, 1996), and other issues. Homophones, such as steel and steal, have been used to explore orthographic priming effects (e.g., Grainger & Ferrand, 1994) and to test the influence ofphonology on visual word recognition processes (e.g., Fleming, 1993; Jared & Seidenberg, 1991; VanOrden, 1987). Homographs with different pronunciations, such as wind, pronounced as Iwajndl or /wmd/, have also been used to study these questions (e.g., Kawamoto & Zernblidge, 1992). In word produetion research, homonyms and homophones have been used to investigate open-versus closed-class vocabulary differences (Dell, 1990), the locus ofword frequency effects (Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994), the effect of phonological priming on word selection (Griffin, 1995), phonology's role in subject-verb agreement errors (Bock & Eberhard, 1993), and the relationship between lexical processing stages (Cutting & Ferreira, 1999). However, part ofwhat makes ambiguous words interesting-namely, the association ofa single form with multiple meanings-also makesThe norming study was conducted at the University of IIIinois at Urbana-Champaign while the author was supported by aNational Science Foundation Fellowship. The research was made possible, in part, by grants from the National Institutes of Health (ROI-HD21011) and the National Science Foundation (SBR 94-11627). Thanks to Kathryn Bock, Victor Ferreira, Leslie Twilley, an anonymous reviewer, and, especially, Gary Deli for suggestions in the preparation ofthis manuscript and to Urbano Chaidez and Edyta Kania for their hard work and patience in data entry. Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Z. M. Griffin, Department ofPsychology, Stanford University, Jordan Hall, Bldg. 420, Stanford, CA 94305-2130 (e-mail: griffin@ psych.stanford.edu).it diffieult to equate them with unambiguous words on the important factor of frequency of meaning use.Word freque...

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A retrospective study of stimulus variables in word association

Cited by 7 publications

References 13 publications

Word association research and the L2 lexicon

Word association research and the L2 lexicon

Conceptual representation in bilingual memory: Effects of concreteness and cognate status in word association

Frequency of meaning use for ambiguous and unambiguous words

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