Verbal association norms for 520 concrete words and relationships with other psycholinguistic variables

By Patrick Bonin, Alain Méot, Ludovic Ferrand, Aurélia Bugaïska
English

This study describes a new set of verbal association norms for 520 concrete nouns in French. Verbal association norms are useful to study the fundamental processes and representations that underpin memory, and language comprehension and production skills. The relationships between these verbal association norms and other psycholinguistic variables are analyzed. The study also examined the stability of the verbal associative norms corresponding to a subset of words from the Ferrand and Alario (1998) study. Among the main findings are the following: (1) There are three relatively distinct sets of items: those for which idiosyncratic responses are numerous; those for which the first-order associate is frequently cited among the participants; and those which have a large number of non-idiosyncratic associates. (2) The different measures corresponding to verbal associates are only weakly related to the psycholinguistic variables considered. (3) First order associates are very stable, at least those most frequently provided by participants in the Ferrand and Alario (1998) study. The norms can be downloaded from the Internet at http://leadserv.u-bourgogne.fr/webpagepabonin/.

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