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Word association is the term used to refer to when a person says the first word that comes into his mind upon hearing a given word. In other words, the person does not think about the word that he has heard but simply answers instinctively.

=History=



Sir Francis Galton was the first person to introduce the concept of word association to the world and is believed to be responsible for the first word association test in psychology. In the late 19th century, Galton conceived word association while he was strolling down Pall Mall in London, England, by attempting to conjure up associations in his mind with the objects and scenes which he saw around him, and in that way devised the first word association test.

In his test, he used a list of 75 stimulus words which he read and then noted his responses. Galton discovered that his responses to the words had a tendency to remain constant and that generally, his responses came from his past childhood experiences. From this, Galton was able to show that associations formed in his early years were likely to be repeated in later trials with the same list, whereas recent associations were less fixed and would vary from trial to trial.

His work prompted further studies by prominent psychologists such as the acclaimed Sigmund Freud in the area of psychoanalysis where Freud dealt with the unconscious mind and free association. Freud believed that such responses provided clues to peoples' personalities.

=Classifications of Word Association= There are three classifications of word association. These are association by similarity, association by contrast and association by contiguity.

Association by Similarity
Association by similarity is based on the belief that the initial word has common features with the associated word. This is thought to be due to humans being conditioned to connect stimuli to comparable experiences, thus creating a synonymous word association, for example, happiness → elation, joy.

Association by Contrast
Alternative to the concept of association by similarity is association by contrast, where the initial word will have features that are opposite to the associated word. This is believed to occur when strong stimuli causes excitement in the beginning, but is then replaced with inhibition in the same regions of the cerebral cortex. This causes an antonymous word association, for example, sadness → joy, happiness.

Association by Contiguity
Association by contiguity arises when events are situated close together in space or time, for example, a flower → a rose or a disease - death.

=Carl Jung=



Word association is connected with the work that Carl Gustav Jung was engaged in while he was at the Burghölzli Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Zurich in the early stages of his career. Under the directorship of Eugen Bleuler, the Burghölzli Psychiatric Clinic was an international center of excellence in psychiatric research at the turn of the 20th century. Jung eventually became director of research on the Word Association Test.

Jung introduced significant innovations to the Word Association Test. In addition to the cognitive dimensions, he placed increased emphasis on the emotional aspects involved. Following on from Galton's work, he observed that the words to which subjects offered unusual responses were connected with themes having an emotional impact on them. He found that subjects invariably do not have conscious control over their responses. He therefore argued that this method was tapping both of a person's conscious and unconscious mind. He found that clusters of ideas, images, and words loaded with much positive or negative affect interfered with the ego by producing unusual responses. Jung decided to call these clusters, complexes. Jung used Freud's theories of repression to account for a person's innate choices of complexes. Freud praised Jung for providing experimental proof of the existence of the unconscious, welcoming him into the early psychoanalytic movement. Although the term “complex” was used by Freud and Josef Breuer previously, it was with Jung's meaning that it finally entered the psychoanalytic vocabulary.

Jung and his associates applied the Word Association Test in many psychiatric contexts, including forensic diagnoses, publishing some remarkable cases of successful detection. A much-neglected facet of Jung's early work is his application of this method to families. He gave the test to members of the same families and found that there were psychological subgroupings in the same family. However, Jung did not possess either the theoretical understanding or the clinical experience to take his findings further.

Gradually, Jung abandoned this method and the whole experimental approach to psychiatry, especially after leaving the Burghölzli Psychiatric Clinic. Later, Jung dedicated his efforts to studying amplification, in lieu of word association.

Word Association Test
The Word Association Test was based on the previous studies on mental associations.

This test usually consisted of a hundred stimulus words that were read out one by one to a subject who was instructed to respond with the first word (i.e., associate) that comes to mind. For example:

The reaction time, verbal response, and test behavior were recorded and analyzed. Verbal responses were classified according to several linguistic categories. The test was then used to diagnose psychological typology and psychopathology.

Cognitive psychologists used word association to investigate how semantic information is stored in memory. Studies have demonstrated that word associations are almost always based on a word's meaning, as opposed to a word’s physical properties. For example, a typical response to the word “plate” might be “food” or perhaps “fork”, but not “hate” or “gate”.

Over the years, psychologists have collected word association norms that describe the relative frequencies with which various responses are given to different words. These frequencies are then used as a measure of the associative strength between the words. For example, if 90% of a large sample of people gives the word “apple” as a response to the word “banana”, this percentage is used as an index of the associative connection between the words “apple” and “banana”. A second way of determining the strength of an association is to measure how long it takes a person to give a response in a word association test. Not surprisingly, high frequency associates are also the ones with the fastest reaction times.

By comparing children's word associations to those of adults, we can learn about how word meanings are acquired. Five year-olds are likely to respond to the word “big” with a response like “man”—indicating that words are organized in their memory according to real world situations and personal experience. By age 10, the most common response is “small”, thereby demonstrating a growing awareness of linguistic relations and grammatical categories.

The Word Association Test has not been widely used since 2005, although it is still taught in some Jungian training programs while some analysts still use it as a technique to enhance the therapeutic process.

=Current Research= While not as popular as it was in the past, research is still being conducted on word association in many different areas of cognitive science. These include looking at word association patterns and seeing how word associations are encoded.

Word Association Patterns
Tess Fitzpatrick, a researcher from Swansea University, set out to discover whether word association patterns for native speakers of a language are predictable. She conducted a study where she had native English speakers complete two word association tasks. The first task had the subjects use response categories, where a group of words was used. Considerable variation was found in the response choices, which implies that all persons are not similar in their response behavior.

The second task conducted looked at how subjects associated words individually. The response behavior was consistent and the subjects responded to the word association tasks predictably.

In other words, people respond differently from one another in word association tasks where groups of words are being associated with different groups. However, in situations where words are associated individually with other words, most people associate the words similarly to one another.

Additionally, Fitzpatrick confirmed that once the words that are most frequently used in word association lists have been exhausted and replaced with less common words, the responses varied significantly among subjects.

Encoding Word Associations
The featural theory of semantic representation assumes that word meanings are represented as a set of semantic features. It is believed that a human's mental lexicon contains a large set of features, and that each word representation comprises a subset of these features. Most people break down words to understand their meanings in a similar way to one another.

For example, the features relevant for the word “fox” might include “has fur”, “can hunt”, and “mammal”. The feature model has also been incorporated into connectionist models of recognition, allowing the linkage of recognition models and semantic representations. In this scenario, the activation of a written or spoken representation ("has fur") would lead to a pattern of activation in the brain.

The most popular way to investigate the types of semantic information stored in the mental lexicon is by semantic priming. If responses between two words are quicker when there is a semantic relationship between the words, then that relationship must be represented in the mental lexicon, seeing as the words might share semantic features.

=Human Brain= The human brain plays the largest and most critical role in understanding how humans make word associations.

fMRI Evidence for Word Association
In 2008, W. Kyle Simmons and a team of researchers conducted a study with the aim of investigating fMRI to see what scientific evidence could be found to determine which parts of the brain were responsible for word association. Firstly, they found that word association did indeed activate Broca’s area in the left inferior frontal gyrus which was a region that had been thoroughly observed and analysed in previous word generation tasks.

In addition, other areas frequently observed in functional neuroimaging studies of language were noted to be active during word association. Activity was observed in the left premotor cortex, which is an area of the brain involved in the generation of object names and word ﬁnding. Activity was also found to occurring the right cerebellum.

Although the cerebellum’s role in movement is well documented, functional neuroimaging studies also frequently observe activity in the right cerebellum when it engaged in linguistic tasks. Recent neuropsychological evidence suggests that the right posterior lateral cerebellum is involved in generating two-word associations, particularly for automatic word associations produced during speech.

Impact of Frontal Lobe
The frontal lobe of the brain plays the most important part in word association. In an experiment done by Posner and his colleagues, they attempted to investigate which area of the brain was responsible for semantic operations.

Semantic Learning
Two tasks were used to conduct the research on semantic learning. The first task required the subject to come up with and say aloud a use for each of 40 concrete nouns (for example, a subject may say "pound" when presented with the noun "hammer"). In this task, two general areas of the cortex were found to be active.

In the second semantic task, the subjects were required to list the presence of dangerous animals in a list of 40 visually presented words. They were also asked to estimate the frequency of these animals after the list was presented. The same two areas of cortex were activated.

One of the areas that was activated in both semantic tasks was in the anterior left frontal lobe. This area is strictly left lateralized and appears to be specific to semantic language tasks. To further test this research, lesions of this area produced deficits in word fluency tests. Thus, it was concluded that this general area is related to the semantic network, which supports this type of word association.

=References=