Journal Article

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

García, Adolfo M, Manoiloff, Laura, Lizarralde, Francisco, Vivas, Leticia, Vivas, Jorge

2019

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: Associative Learning / Associative processes / Cognitive psychology / College Faculty / Cues / Experimental Psychology / Feedback (Response) / Laboratories / Lexical semantics / Linguistics / Meaning / Memory / Neurosciences / Periodicals / Phonology / Priming / Property / Psycholinguistics / Semantic features / Semantic relations / Semantics / Verbal Learning / Word and letter association / Word association / Word Processing