Birkbeck Word Association Norms Book

This is a reference work containing free association norms for over 2000 words in the English language, collected from groups of 40-50 British English speakers between the ages of 17 and 45, over the last eight years. 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 pillar and in response to the name Michael, 65% say Jackson, while less than 5% come up with Heseltine or Caine. These norms will be of use to researchers and students in many fields of psychology, especially the study of language and memory, where the degree of association between pairs of words is often an important experimental variable. This is the first large scale collection of British English norms to be published; to date researchers have had to rely on out-of-date American norms or spend many hours collecting their own association data. The main part of the book contains an alphabetic list of all associative responses and their frequency for each of the 2464 stimulus words. In addition there is an index of stimulus words organized 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.Read More