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<div>This same thing happened to me ... </div>
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<div>Mike Round</div>
<div>Center for autoSocratic Excellence</div>
<div><A href="http://www.rationalsys.com">www.rationalsys.com</A></div>
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<div style="FONT-FAMILY: arial,helvetica; COLOR: black; FONT-SIZE: 10pt">-----Original Message-----<br>
From: Justin Washtell <lec3jrw@leeds.ac.uk><br>
To: Marc Brysbaert <marc.brysbaert@ugent.be>; corpora <corpora@uib.no><br>
Sent: Wed, Feb 15, 2012 6:41 am<br>
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] a worldwide word association test<br>
<br>
<div style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #fff; MARGIN: 0px; FONT-FAMILY: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif; COLOR: #000; FONT-SIZE: 12px" id=AOLMsgPart_0_5a5f8b46-92ac-4e13-8d9a-caf53748274a><PRE style="FONT-SIZE: 9pt"><TT>Hi,
I found this incarnation of the word association experiment a little unnatural.
**Perhaps it is best not to read on at this stage if you're planning on having a
go at it, just in case I influence you!!**
For each word the user is asked to provide three responses, one below the last,
which arise "spontaneously" from the cue word. I think its fair to say that
personally I never had three responses all come to mind simultaneously, such
that I could hold them in my mind and then fill out the boxes. Rather, I'd have
one arrive (which I might then fill in) and then I'd have to "allow" my mind to
come up with another and so on.
What I found however was that my latter responses tended to be influenced by my
previous responses, and in some cases were only very tenuously associated with
the original cue word, or not at all (e.g. awake -> alive -> kicking; idea ->
thought -> provoke). I then found myself in the peculiar situation of
consciously fighting this urge... and also of course wondering whether perhaps I
shouldn't do such a thing. To be fair, the experimenters do provide the option
of writing "no response", and I did this a few times when I was in doubt.
I wonder then if the experimenters are accounting for this effect (I hope it is
not just me!) Presumably the box to which a response belongs is being recorded,
so if the second and third responses are indeed coloured by this sort of effect
then it can be observed, and perhaps even factored out if it is not in keeping
with the aims of the study. But what if users fill the boxes in some other
arbitrary or even random order, as opposed to top-to-bottom like I did? More
generally, I wonder whether the task of trying to be alert for three
simultaneous responses may make this a more of a conscious task and colour the
types of responses garnered.
I'd be interested to hear others thoughts having attempted the task.
On a related note, there is a similar experiment which has been running for some
years now at <A href="http://www.wordassociation.org%3chttp//www.wordassociation.org" target=_blank>www.wordassociation.org<http://www.wordassociation.org</A>>. I did make
a few attempts to tried to contact the creator, to try and obtain the
(substantial) data for my PhD thesis, but had no luck. Does anybody know
anything about this?
Justin Washtell
University of Leeds
________________________________
From: <A href="mailto:corpora-bounces@uib.no">corpora-bounces@uib.no</A> [<A href="mailto:corpora-bounces@uib.no">corpora-bounces@uib.no</A>] On Behalf Of Marc
Brysbaert [<A href="mailto:marc.brysbaert@ugent.be">marc.brysbaert@ugent.be</A>]
Sent: 15 February 2012 10:07
To: <A href="mailto:corpora@uib.no">corpora@uib.no</A>
Subject: [Corpora-List] a worldwide word association test
Dear all,
Gert Storms and Simon De Deyne are running a worldwide word association test in
English. Thus far they have over 1.25 million responses, but they require many
more in order to have enough spontaneously produced associates to all known
English words. The data will be made available to all researchers, just like the
Florida norms, so that we can use them for our studies and include them in our
computational models. Would it be possible to forward the call to your
colleagues and students? The task itself only takes 5 minutes and involves
giving associates to a few target words.
Many thanks in advance, marc brysbaert
From: Gerrit Storms [<A href="mailto:Gert.Storms@ppw.kuleuven.be?">mailto:Gert.Storms@ppw.kuleuven.be</A>]
Sent: 15 February 2012 10:55
To: Marc Brysbaert
Subject: word associations
Dear Marc,
Can I ask you a little favor?
Over the past few months, we have been trying to set up a scientific study that
is important for many researchers interested in words, word meaning, semantics,
and cognitive science in general. It is a huge word association project, in
which people are asked to participate in a small task that doesn't last longer
than 5 minutes. Our goal is to build a global word association network that
contains connections between about 40.000 words, the size of the lexicon of an
average adult. Setting up such a network might teach us a lot about semantic
memory, how it develops, and maybe also about how it can deteriorate (like in
Alzheimer's disease). Most people enjoy doing the task, but we need thousands of
participants to succeed. Up till today, we found about 40,000 participants
willing to do the little task, but we need more responses. That is why we
address you. Would it be possible to forward this call for participation to
graduate and undergraduate students who are fluent in English?
The task can be found at
<A href="http://www.smallworldofwords.com/" target=_blank>http://www.smallworldofwords.com</A>
Of course the network will be freely available to all interested language
researchers when it becomes substantial enough.
We thank you in advance.
If you want more information, don't hesitate to contact me.
With kind regards,
Prof. G. Storms and Dr. S. De Deyne
Department of Psychology
University of Leuven
Tiensestraat 102
3000 Leuven
Belgium
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