Does verb transitivity influence word association responses?

Abstract

Although several studies have investigated the influence of the grammatical class of cue words on response patterns in the word association task, relatively little is known about the influence of more fine-grained distinctions such as cue transitivity. The present study test investigated two predictions of the influence of this variable made in existing studies. The first is that cue transitivity would influence the grammatical class of responses; the second, that it would affect the directionality of position-based, or syntagmatic, responses. English language associative responses to 49 transitive and 49 intransitive cues were gathered from 53 English L1 respondents. These responses were then analysed according to their grammatical class and categorical designation. Results suggested that cue transitivity influences both of these measurements: transitive cues yielded more noun responses and more associations classified as likely to follow the cue in text than did intransitives, while transitives received more verb responses and more associations likely to precede the cue. These results are discussed in the light of contiguity-based and semantic theories of the determinants of word association.

Exploring the impact of lexical context on word association responses

“…The specific cues used in the study were the same as those used in a previous experiment investigating the influence of transitivity on word association responses (Thwaites, 2019(Thwaites, , 2020.…”

“…That is, collocation lists for intransitive cues featured only words which preceded the cue in a corpus, and transitives only those words which followed the cue. This is because previous research has shown that intransitive cues yield significantly more responses which precede the cue than do transitives, while transitive cues are significantly more likely to yield responses which follow the cue (Thwaites, 2019(Thwaites, , 2020. After arriving at a list of collocates for each cue, the entropy of each collocational profile was calculated using…”