ERIC Number: ED025329
Record Type: RIE
Publication Date: 1965-Nov-30
Reference Count: 0
Word Associations as Related to Children's Verbal Habits.
Palermo, David S.
Free-association norms for 200 words were obtained in 1964 from the responses of 500 subjects in each of grades four through eight, 10, and 12 and from 1,000 college students. An analysis of this normative data revealed that (1) the frequency of occurrence of the most popular associative responses to stimulus words increases with the age of the subject, (2) the number of different responses to a word decreases with the age of the subject, (3) the response words themselves undergo about a 50 percent change from the fourth grade to college, (4) contrast or opposite responses increase with age, and (5) paradigmatic responses also increase with the age of the subject. Thus, word-association characteristics vary importantly between children and adults. The influence of the associative strength of words on different verbal learning tasks has been investigated. Such an influence has been demonstrated for paired-associate learning, clustering in free recall, associative generalization, and mediated generalization. Normative word association data have also been collected for children in grades one through four. Analysis of these data shows the same trends as observed in the norms discussed for the larger population. (WD)
Publication Type: N/A
Education Level: N/A
Sponsor: National Inst. of Child Health and Human Development (NIH), Bethesda, MD.
Authoring Institution: Michigan Univ., Ann Arbor. Center for Human Growth and Development.
Identifiers: Free Association Norms