Norms Of Word Association

Norms of Word Association contains a heterogeneous collection of word association norms. This book brings together nine sets of association norms that were collected independently at different times during a 15-year period. Each chapter is a self-contained unit. The order in which the norms are presented is arbitrary, although an attempt is made to group together norms that seem to belong together. The 1952 Minnesota norms are presented first, due to "age" and in recognition of the fact that a number of the norms that follow are direct outgrowths of this work. The next three norms in this collection are responses to the Russell-Jenkins stimuli obtained from subjects representing different linguistic communities. A summary of association norms collected from British and Australian subjects are reported along with association norms from German and French college students and French workmen. Four sets of norms that are not directly related to the 1952 Minnesota collection are included. The text will be of interest to historians and researchers in the field of verbal learning and verbal behavior.

This is a reference work containing free association norms for over 2000 words in the English language collected over the last eight years from groups of 40-50 British English speakers aged between 17 and 45. These norms provide the information that, for example, 67% of people give dog as the first word they think of in response to the word cat, that 24% give the word society in response to the word pillar, and given the name Michael, 65% say Jackson, whereas less than 5% say Heseltine or Caine. These norms will be of use to researchers and students in many fields of psychology, especially language and memory, where the degree of association between pairs of words is often an important experimental variable. The main part of the book contains an alphabetical list of all associative responses and their frequency for each of the 2464 stimulus words. In addition, there is an index of stimulus words organised according to semantic category to aid selection of experimental materials. Full methodological details of the collection and compilation of the data are also provided in the introduction.

The book overviews a wide range of vocabulary research methodologies, and offers practical advice on how to carry out valid and reliable research on first and second language vocabulary. It includes a Resources section which outlines the lexical tests, corpora, software, internet sites, and other resources available to vocabulary researchers.