Core Semantic Links or Lexical Associations: Assessing the Nature of Responses in Word Association Tasks

Vivas, Leticia; Manoiloff, Laura; Garcia, Adolfo M.; Lizarralde, Francisco; Vivas, Jorge

Abstract

The processes tapped by the widely-used word association (WA) paradigm remain a matter of debate: while some authors consider them as driven by lexical co-occurrences, others emphasize the role of meaning-based connections. To test these contrastive hypotheses, we analyzed responses in a WA task in terms of their normative defining features (those describing the object denoted by the cue word). Results indicate that 72.5% of the responses had medium-to-high coincidence with such defining semantic features. Moreover, 75.51% of responses had medium-to-high values of Relevance (a measure of the importance of the feature for construing a given concept). Furthermore, most responses (62.7%) referred to elements of the situation in which the concept usually appears, followed by sensory properties (e.g., color) of the denoted object (27.86%). These results suggest that the processes behind WA tasks involve a reactivation of the cue item's semantic properties, particularly those most relevant to its core meaning.

Más información

Título según WOS: ID WOS:000459617100015 Not found in local WOS DB
Título de la Revista: JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH
Volumen: 48
Número: 1
Editorial: SPRINGER/PLENUM PUBLISHERS
Fecha de publicación: 2019
Página de inicio: 243
Página final: 256
DOI:

10.1007/s10936-018-9601-8

Notas: ISI