ListChecker Pro 1.2: A program designed to facilitate creating word lists using the University of South Florida word association norms

Various areas of research (e.g., memory, metamemory, visual word recognition, associative priming) rely on the careful construction of reliable word lists. ListChecker Pro 1.2 is a computer program that accesses the University of South Florida word association norms (Nelson, McEvoy, & Schreiber, 1998, 2004) to report characteristics of words (e.g., frequency, concreteness), as well as direct and indirect associative relationships (e.g., shared associates, mediators). The present article presents the input requirements, menu options, and output obtained by ListChecker Pro 1.2. In addition, a randomly selected list of words from the associative versus semantic priming literature was submitted to ListChecker Pro 1.2 to demonstrate how seemingly unrelated words can be associated. The zipped file containing the program and database can be downloaded from www .eakinmemorylab.psychology.msstate.edu.     

How activation, entanglement, and searching a semantic network contribute to event memory

Free-association norms indicate that words are organized into semantic/associative neighborhoods within a larger network of words and links that bind the net together. We present evidence indicating that memory for a recent word event can depend on implicitly and simultaneously activating related words in its neighborhood. Processing a word during encoding primes its network representation as a function of the density of the links in its neighborhood. Such priming increases recall and recognition and can have long-lasting effects when the word is processed in working memory. Evidence for this phenomenon is reviewed in extralist-cuing, primed free-association, intralist-cuing, and single-item recognition tasks. The findings also show that when a related word is presented in order to cue the recall of a studied word, the cue activates the target in an array of related words that distract and reduce the probability of the target’s selection. The activation of the semantic network produces priming benefits during encoding, and search costs during retrieval. In extralist cuing, recall is a negative function of cue-to-distractor strength, and a positive function of neighborhood density, cue-to-target strength, and target-to-cue strength. We show how these four measures derived from the network can be combined and used to predict memory performance. These measures play different roles in different tasks, indicating that the contribution of the semantic network varies with the context provided by the task. Finally, we evaluate spreading-activation and quantum-like entanglement explanations for the priming effects produced by neighborhood density.     

Is there something quantum-like about the human mental lexicon?

Following an early claim by Nelson and McEvoy suggesting that word associations can display ‘spooky action at a distance behaviour’, a serious investigation of the potentially quantum nature of such associations is currently underway. In this paper quantum theory is proposed as a framework suitable for modelling the human mental lexicon, specifically the results obtained from both intralist and extralist word association experiments. Some initial models exploring this hypothesis are discussed, and experiments capable of testing these models proposed.     

Free-association norms for the Spanish names of the Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures

The most frequent names in Spanish corresponding to a set of 247 pictures in the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) norms were used as stimuli in a discrete free-association task. A sample of 525 Spanish-speaking participants provided the first word that came to mind for each of the verbal stimuli. Responses were organized according to frequency of production in order to prepare word-association norms for the set of stimuli.     

Free-association norms for the Spanish names of the Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures.

The most frequent names in Spanish corresponding to a set of 247 pictures in the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) norms were used as stimuli in a discrete free-association task. A sample of 525 Spanish-speaking participants provided the first word that came to mind for each of the verbal stimuli. Responses were organized according to frequency of production in order to prepare word-association norms for the set of stimuli.     

Entropy,semantic relatedness and proximity

Although word co-occurrences within a document have been demonstrated to be semantically useful, word interactions over a local range have been largely neglected by psychologists due to practical challenges. Shannon’s (Bell Systems Technical Journal, 27, 379–423, 623–665, 1948) conceptualization of information theory suggests that these interactions should be useful for understanding communication. Computational advances make an examination of local word–word interactions possible for a large text corpus. We used Brants and Franz’s (2006) dataset to generate conditional probabilities for 62,474 word pairs and entropy calculations for 9,917 words in Nelson, McEvoy, and Schreiber’s (Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36, 402–407, 2004) free association norms. Semantic associativity correlated moderately with the probabilities and was stronger when the two words were not adjacent. The number of semantic associates for a word and the entropy of a word were also correlated. Finally, language entropy decreases from 11 bits for single words to 6 bits per word for four-word sequences. The probabilities and entropies discussed here are included in the supplemental materials for the article.     

Word associations: Norms for 1,424 Dutch words in a continuous task

This study describes the collection of a large set of word association norms. In a continuous word association task, norms for 1,424 Dutch words were gathered. For each cue, three association responses were obtained per participant. In total, an average of 268 responses were collected for each cue. We investigated the relationship with similar procedures, such as discrete association tasks and exemplar generation tasks. The results show that the use of a continuous task allows the study of weaker associations in comparison with a discrete task. The effects of the continuous tasks were investigated for set size and the availability characteristics of the responses, measured through word frequency, age of acquisition, and imageability. Finally, we compared our findings to those of a semantically constrained version of the association task in which participants generated responses within the domain of a semantic category. Results of this comparison are discussed. The Appendix cited in this article is available at www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

The ties that bind what is known to the recall of what is new

Cued recall success varies with what people know and with what they do during an episode. This paper focuses on prior knowledge and disentangles the relative effects of 10 features of words and their relationships on cued recall. Results are reported for correlational and multiple regression analyses of data obtained from free association norms and from 29 experiments. The 10 features were only weakly correlated with each other in the norms and, with notable exceptions, in the experiments. The regression analysis indicated that forward cue-to-target strength explained the most variance, followed by backward target-to-cue strength. Target connectivity and set size explained the next most variance, along with mediated cue-to-target strength. Finally, frequency, concreteness, shared associate strength, and cue set size also contributed significantly to recall. Taken together, indices of prior word knowledge explain 49% of the recall variance. Theoretically driven equations that use free association to predict cued recall were also evaluated. Each equation was designed to condense multiple indices of word interconnectivity into a single predictor.     

You are my happiness: Socially enriched happiness belief predicts life satisfaction,especially among the poor

ABSTRACT

What three words come to your mind in response to “happiness”? Using a free-association task [cf. Nelson, D. L., McEvoy, C. L., & Dennis, S. (2000). What is free association and what does it measure? Memory and Cognition, 28, 887–899], this research finds that the number of social words (e.g. family, love) provided in link to happiness predicts people’s actual life satisfaction level. However, this association was significantly moderated by the person’s self-perceived financial state. The contingency between holding a socially-oriented belief about happiness and experienced life satisfaction was significant among members of low socioeconomic status (SES), but not among the high SES group. This pattern was replicated across two divergent samples (Asian college students, Study 1; American adults, Study 2), regardless of one’s extraversion level (Studies 1, 2) and availability of social support (number of friends, Study 2). Given the overlapping function of money and social relationships (instrumental in promoting survival), believing in the social nature of happiness seems to be more central in the life satisfaction of those with less financial resource.     

Component processes of conceptual priming and associative cued recall: the roles of preexisting representation and depth of processing

The authors investigated depth-of-processing effects on conceptual priming by comparing incidental (implicit) and intentional (explicit) tests of word association. In Experiment 1, depth of processing at study influenced priming of weak and medium associates but not of strong associates. In Experiment 2, depth of processing influenced priming of weak associates but not of compound phrases (e.g., coathanger), whose preexperimental association strength matched that of weak associates. In Experiment 3, the same pattern persisted when study was auditory and test was visual, ensuring that priming was conceptual and not perceptual. In all experiments, in matched intentional tests, depth-of-processing effects occurred for all association strengths and for both phrases and associates, suggesting that the incidental tests were uncontaminated by voluntary retrieval, because they showed depth-of-processing effects only for some materials and not others, within the same participants and tests. Because depth-of-processing effects on involuntary free-association priming depend on the presence versus absence of a cohesive preexperimental representation, the memory-systems and conceptual/perceptual processing approaches to memory-test dissociations require modification to account for component processes of conceptual priming.     

Judgments of associative memory

Judgments of associative memory (JAM) were indexed by ratings given to pairs of cue and response words. The normed probabilities, p(response|cue), were obtained from free association norms. The ratings were linearly related to the probabilities. The JAM functions were characterized by high intercepts ( approximately 50 on a 100 point scale) and shallow slopes (<0.5). The JAM function generalized across materials and method of rating. The function was not affected by expectancies or semantic similarity. Attempts to alter the function by making alternative responses more available were unsuccessful. A computer simulation model (MINERVA 2) exhibited the linear JAM function and successfully accounted for more complex phenomena (like the joint influence of forward and backward associative strengths on ratings). The shallow JAM slope appears to result from a fundamental lack of discrimination among associative strengths. The high intercept appears to result partly from an independent post-mnemonic source of bias producing over-estimation of association.     

Lexical Association and False Memory for Words in Two Cultures

This study examined the relationship between language experience and false memory produced by the DRM paradigm. The word lists used in Stadler, et al. (Memory & Cognition, 27, 494–500, 1999) were first translated into Chinese. False recall and false recognition for critical non-presented targets were then tested on a group of Chinese users. The average co-occurrence rate of the list word and the critical word was calculated based on two large Chinese corpuses. List–level analyses revealed that the correlation between the American and Taiwanese participants was significant only in false recognition. More importantly, the co-occurrence rate was significantly correlated with false recall and recognition of Taiwanese participants, and not of American participants. In addition, the backward association strength based on Nelson et al. (The University of South Florida word association, rhyme and word fragment norms, 1999) was significantly correlated with false recall of American participants and not of Taiwanese participants. Results are discussed in terms of the relationship between language experiences and lexical association in creating false memory for word lists.     

A dissociation between two implicit conceptual tests supports the distinction between types of conceptual processing

Subjects studied words in a classification task (to what categories does it belong?) or in a production task (producing associates to the word) and then completed one of two implicit memory tests—category association or free association. The classification study task and the category-association test emphasize categorical relations between concepts, and the production study task and the free-association test draw on associative relations. As predicted by the transfer-appropriate processing principle, priming in the category-association test was larger for words studied under the classification task than for those studied under the production task, whereas the opposite was true in the free-association test. This crossover dissociation is the first obtained between two implicit conceptual tests, and it provides support for the claim that it is necessary to distinguish between different types of conceptual processing.     

Recall and response time norms for English–Swahili word pairs and facts about Kenya

In the vast literature exploring learning, many studies have used paired-associate stimuli, despite the fact that real-world learning involves many different types of information. One of the most popular materials used in studies of learning has been a set of Swahili–English word pairs for which Nelson and Dunlosky (Memory 2; 325–335, 1994) published recall norms two decades ago. These norms involved use of the Swahili words as cues to facilitate recall of the English translation. It is unclear whether cueing in the opposite direction (from English to Swahili) would lead to symmetric recall performance. Bilingual research has suggested that translation in these two different directions involves asymmetric links that may differentially impact recall performance, depending on which language is used as the cue (Kroll & Stewart, Journal of Memory and Language 33; 149–174,1994). Moreover, the norms for these and many other learning stimuli have typically been gathered from college students. In the present study, we report recall accuracy and response time norms for Swahili words when they are cued by their English translations. We also report norms for a companion set of fact stimuli that may be used along with the Swahili–English word pairs to assess learning on a broader scale across different stimulus materials. Data were collected using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to establish a sample that was diverse in both age and ethnicity. These different, but related, stimulus sets will be applicable to studies of learning, metacognition, and memory in diverse samples.     

Determinants of associative response latency

The relationship between single-word, free-association response latency and the following characteristics of Kent-Rosanoff words were examined: ( a ) grammatical form class, ( b ) emotionality, ( c ) familiarity, and ( d ) D (the number of different response words given to a stimulus word in a single-word free-association situation by a group of subjects). In addition was examined the relationship between response latency and ( e ) the type of associative linkage constituted by the stimulus-response combination, and ( f ) response frequency. Given the limits posed by the present stimulus material, subject material, and analyses performed, the conclusion was reached that single-word, free-associative response latency is related primarily to D ( r =0.81), secondly to the frequency with which a given stimulus-response combination occurs in a group of subjects.     

One step is not enough: Making better use of association norms to predict cued recall

Cued recall is strongly affected by the strength of the preexisting connection between the test cue and the information to be recalled, the target. In all past work, preexisting cue-to-target strength has been measured by the probability that the cue produced the target in free association. This paper presents four experiments showing that this use of such norms underestimates the strength of the connection and that a more accurate estimate can be obtained by incorporating indirect as well as direct connections in the estimate. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that in extralist cued recall both the strength and number of two-step indirect connections facilitate recall. Experiment 3 showed that three-step connections have negligible effects. Experiment 4 used an intralist task in which cue and target are first studied together, and the results showed once again that indirect connections can affect recall. In all of these experiments, indirect connections had an effect on recall that was larger when direct cue-to-target strength was weak than when it was strong. Implications for using association norms in research are described, and an algorithm for using association norms to measure cueto-target strength is proposed.     

Gender, personality, and involuntary autobiographical memory

We utilised the recently developed continuous word association task (CWAT) to investigate whether attributes of involuntary autobiographical memory, including gender and cue valence effects, were similar to those found for voluntary autobiographical memory, as well as investigating the role of individual differences in memory production. A total of 80 undergraduate volunteers reported involuntary memories that came to mind during the word association task and completed measures of trait dissociation and psychosis-proneness. Involuntary memories showed similar cue valence effects to those typically found with voluntary memories but the usual gender effect was only apparent once participants learned the task involved autobiographical memory. The total number of involuntary autobiographical memories produced in response to negative cue words was related to greater trait dissociation and psychosis-proneness. The implications for differences between voluntary and involuntary autobiographical memory are discussed.     

Priming in a free association task as a function of association directionality

Two experiments investigated priming in free association, a conceptual implicit memory task. The stimuli consisted of bidirectionally associated word pairs (e.g., BEACH-SAND) and unidirectionally associated word pairs that have no association from the target response back to the stimulus cue (e.g., BONE-DOG). In the study phase, target words (e.g., SAND, DOG) were presented in an incidental learning task. In the test phase, participants generated an associate to the stimulus cues (e.g., BEACH, BONE). In both experiments, priming was obtained for targets (e.g., SAND) that had an association back to the cue, but not for targets (e.g., DOG) for which such a backward association was absent. These results are problematic for theoretical accounts that attribute priming in free association to the strengthening of target responses. It is argued that priming in free association depends on the strengthening of cue-target associations.     

The University of South Florida free association, rhyme, and word fragment norms.

Preexisting word knowledge is accessed in many cognitive tasks, and this article offers a means for indexing this knowledge so that it can be manipulated or controlled. We offer free association data for 72,000 word pairs, along with over a million entries of related data, such as forward and backward strength, number of competing associates, and printed frequency. A separate file contains the 5,019 normed words, their statistics, and thousands of independently normed rhyme, stem, and fragment cues. Other files provide n x n associative networks for more than 4,000 words and a list of idiosyncratic responses for each normed word. The database will be useful for investigators interested in cuing, priming, recognition, network theory, linguistics, and implicit testing applications. They also will be useful for evaluating the predictive value of free association probabilities as compared with other measures, such as similarity ratings and co-occurrence norms. Of several procedures for measuring preexisting strength between two words, the best remains to be determined. The norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

Validity of a group measure of individual associative domains

FlekkØy, K. Validity of a group measure of individual associative domains. Scand. J. Psychol., 1973, 14, 96–98.-Number of different responses given to a stimulus word by a group of subjects in a single-word free-association situation (D) has been presumed to be a measure of the magnitude of the associative potential connected with the stimulus word in the individual subject. The study compares D with mean number of different responses given to each stimulus word in a continued association situation (m), and finds no significant correlation (r=-0.04), which is interpreted to mean that D is not a valid measure of individual associative domains.