Are Word Association Responses Really the First Words that Come to Mind?

Playfoot, David; Balint, Teodor; Pandya, Vibhuti; Parkes, Averil; Peters, Mollie; Richards, Samantha

doi:10.1093/applin/amw015

Cited by 19 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 29 publications

(28 reference statements)

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“…LASS, for example, may imply that linguistic WA responses are somewhat more automatic than conceptual ones, since the latter might be slowed by conscious generation of images and memories. Playfoot et al (2016) looked more closely at the concept of automaticity, investigating whether WA responses are in fact the first word which comes to mind, as is generally assumed. Across two experiments, the authors found working memory capacity effects on both a standard free association task and a novel creative association task, in which participants were asked to generate associations which they felt would be unique.…”

Section: Mapping Wa Findings Onto Psychological Constructsmentioning

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: Mapping Wa Findings Onto Psychological Constructsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Word association research and the L2 lexicon

Fitzpatrick

Thwaites

2020

Lang. Teach.

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“…Playing the game feels effortless, automatic, and often entertaining. 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). 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).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The “Small World of Words” English word association norms for over 12,000 cue words

et al. 2018

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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.

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“…Free word association method contributes to establishing the strongest links that the words have in the speakers' lexicon. Word association responses reflect the first word that comes to the respondents' mind (Playfoot et al, 2016). The method of mind maps (figure 01) is apt for increasing the number of potentially possible communicative situations that the cue wordactivates.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%