The collection of these norms started more than 40 years ago and involved over 6,000 participants. Although it first appeared in 2004, it has been cited over 1,900 times and is still the most commonly used resource in English. One of the most widely used resources comes from the University of South Florida norms (Nelson et al., 2004, USF norms,). The collection and usage of word association norms have a long history. This makes it comparable in size to a similar project in Dutch (De Deyne et al., 2013b) and substantially larger than any existing English-language resource. Footnote 1 The data were collected between 20 and consist of + 12,000 cue words and judgments from over 90,000 participants. In this paper, we present a new and comprehensive set of word association norms from the English Small World of Words project (SWOW-EN). Taken together, these properties make word associations an ideal tool to study internal representations and processes involved in word meaning and language in general. This means that a variety of stimuli can be used as cues, regardless of their part-of-speech or how abstract or concrete they are. Relative to other tasks, however, the word association technique provides us with a more general and unbiased approach to measure meaning (Deese, 1965). ![]() As a technique, it is closely related to other subjective fluency tasks like the semantic feature elicitation task (McRae et al., 2005 Vinson & Vigliocco, 2008) and various category fluency tasks (e.g., Battig & Montague, 1969) in which participants list as many exemplars for a category such as animals within a 1-min period. The simplicity of the task makes it an attractive methodological tool, and a remarkably powerful one: word associations reveal mental representations that cannot be reduced to lexical usage patterns, as the associations are free from the basic demands of communication in natural language (Szalay & Deese, 1978 Prior & Bentin, 2008 Mollin, 2009). Generating a word associate is easy and indeed, responding with a word that is not the first thing that comes to mind turns out to be quite difficult (Playfoot et al., 2016). Playing the game feels effortless, automatic, and often entertaining. The “word association game” is deceptively simple: you are presented with a word (the cue), and you have to respond with the first word that comes to mind. ![]() Finally, a comparison with existing English word association sets further highlights systematic improvements provided through these new norms. 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. We evaluate the utility of the dataset in several different contexts, including lexical decision and semantic categorization. Our procedure allowed subjects to provide multiple responses for each cue, which permits us to measure weak associations. We describe the collection of word associations for over 12,000 cue words, currently the largest such English-language resource in the world. In this work, we address both issues by introducing a new English word association dataset. 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.
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