Tracking Lexico-Semantic Developmental Using Free Association Norms

• In Event: Poster Session 14
  In Poster Session: PS 14 Topic - Attention, Learning, Memory

Abstract

In a free association task, participants are given a cue word and asked to respond with the first word that comes to their mind. The probability with which one word calls to mind another word has proven to be a good predictor of performance in a wide variety of semantic tasks. However, although the task being recognized as a simple but powerful methodological tool for studying lexico-semantic development, previous studies suffer from two important limitations. First, there is a lack of data for children under the age of 5. Second, previous studies have typically been small-sampled studies and thus lack generalizability. Here we present a preliminary data from a project that aims to address these issues and provide reliable developmental norms of word associations by collecting large data samples across a wide developmental age range (3-17 years).
The current data set has been collected on a sample of 681 children (M=6.05, SD=1.86) using 151 cue words. Participants were presented up to 25 cue words one at a time, and were asked to provide for each cue word up to three words that pop into their head. The present analyses focused on examining the change in proportion of responses reflecting lexico-semantic relations based on co-occurrence in language (syntagmatic links), and similarity in meaning (paradigmatic links). Therefore, participants’ responses were classified as syntagmatic (e.g., dog-bone), paradigmatic (e.g., dog-bird), both syntagmatic and paradigmatic (e.g., dog-cat), or other (e.g., neither syntagmatic or paradigmatic, dog-pizza). As expected, the proportion of idiosyncratic response decreased with age, while the proportion of response reflecting word co-occurrence (syntagmatic) increased. Contrary to the findings of previous studies (e.g., Entwisle, 1996), we found no increase in response based on “pure” paradigmatic links. We argue that the reason lies in the fact that previous studies did not account for many responses in the free association task reflecting lexico-semantic links that are supported by both - syntagmatic and paradigmatic links. Our data shows an increase in this type of response with age, and that this increase may be linked not only to maturation, but also the amount of experience with language, i.e. words that are learned earlier demonstrate larger increase with age than words learned later in development (see Figure 1). Since syntagmatic links do not show an interaction with the age-of-acquisition of the cue words, it is likely that this category of responses (both syntagmatic and paradigmatic) is not solely stemming from the co-occurrence based syntagmatic links, but rather represents a genuine increase in understanding paradigmatic relations. We discuss this finding, an increase in paradigmatic links only when supported by syntagmatic links, in the context of a recently proposed associative account of lexico-semantic development (e.g., Sloutsky, Yim, Yao & Dennis, 2017).
In sum, the study presents an important step towards a detailed description of change in word associations across lexico-semantic development, and provides novel insights on the nature of change in syntagmatic and paradigmatic links early in development.

Authors

• Hyungwook Yim, The University of Melbourne
  Presenting Author

• Alexandria Barkhimer, Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Olivera Savic, Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Simon J. Dennis, The University of Melbourne
  Non-Presenting Author

• Vladimir Sloutsky, Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author