Words index  Vivian Cook

Word Associations

What is the first word that comes into your head when you see the word blue?

The top five associations for blue are sky, black, green, red, white. However of course people’s associations vary considerably; one produced kind of – Kind of Blue was the Miles Davis album she had been listening to.

Try the following for yourself. Cover the right hand side, give the first words that come into your head and then check whether your answers are in the top five, given in order of popularity.

  1. Bread   …...                                         butter, water, loaf, food, money

  2. On       ……                                        off, top, in, time, to

  3. Love    ……                                        hate, sex, girl, life, marriage

  4. Bird     ……                                        fly, girl, tree, song, feathers

  5. London ……                                       city, town, bridge, home, capital

  6. Drive   ……                                        car, in, mad, away, careful

  7. Drink   ……                                        water, beer, thirst, eat, drunk

  8. Sky      ……                                        blue, cloud, stars, night, XXX

  9. Hot ……                                             cold, cool, dog, house, humid

  10. With    ……                                        without, out, together, her, me

  11. Quickly ……                                       fast, slowly, now, run, speed

  12. Carefully……                                      carelessly, slowly, care, done, gently

Now look at all your responses and see which of these categories they fall into.

–  rhyming words, dove for love (called clang responses)

– words that continue a structure in order and are a different type of word, blue sky for sky (adjective and noun) (called syntagmatic responses)

– words from the same word type, i.e. butter for bread  (both nouns) (called paradigmatic responses)

Deductions

1 clang responses are most common on L2 users of English

2. syntagmatic responses are found most often in young children

3. paradigmatic responses are found most often in adults