23.734, Qs: Word Association Project

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LINGUIST List: Vol-23-734. Tue Feb 14 2012. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 23.734, Qs: Word Association Project

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1)
Date: 10-Feb-2012
From: gert storms [gert.storms at psy.kuleuven.be]
Subject: Word Association Project


-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:00:37
From: gert storms [gert.storms at psy.kuleuven.be]
Subject: Word Association Project

E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=23-734.html&submissionid=4540605&topicid=8&msgnumber=1
 
Hi all,

Over the past few weeks, we (several psycholinguists from different 
universities) have been trying to set up a scientific study that is 
important for many researchers interested in words, word meaning, 
and semantics.  It is a huge word association project, in which people 
are asked to participate in a small task that doesn't last langer 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 learn 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. After 
sending e-mails to psychology and cognitive science students some 
weeks ago, we got about 10,000 participants quickly, but unfortunately 
the frequency of participation slowed down and we need more 
subjects. 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 on 

http://www.smallworldofwords.com 

If people would REALLY like to help us, they can forward the call to 
students, friends, family, etc. or distribute the call through facebook, 
twitter, etc.   (In this way, we succeeded in building a word association 
network in Dutch over the past years.  The network comprises about 
13,000 words and was built using more than 4,000,000 word 
associations, gathered from 100,000 native Dutch speakers.  The 
problem is only: who cares about Dutch data.  That is why we want to 
do the same in English.) 
If anyone has suggestions on how to reach more fluent English 
participants for this study, please don't hesitate to contact us.
Needless to say that 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 & Dr. S. De Deyne
Department of Psychology 
University of Leuven 
Tiensestraat 102 
3000 Leuven 
Belgium 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
                     Psycholinguistics
                     Syntax





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