Birkbeck Word Association Norms

Book excerpt: This is a reference work containing free association norms for over 2000 words in the English language collected over the last eight years from groups of 40-50 British English speakers aged between 17 and 45. These norms provide the information that, for example, 67% of people give dog as the first word they think of in response to the word cat, that 24% give the word society in response to the word pillar, and given the name Michael, 65% say Jackson, whereas less than 5% say Heseltine or Caine. These norms will be of use to researchers and students in many fields of psychology, especially language and memory, where the degree of association between pairs of words is often an important experimental variable. The main part of the book contains an alphabetical list of all associative responses and their frequency for each of the 2464 stimulus words. In addition, there is an index of stimulus words organised according to semantic category to aid selection of experimental materials. Full methodological details of the collection and compilation of the data are also provided in the introduction.