Semantic word association: comparative data for Brazilian children and adults

The construction of associated word lists is important for the elaboration of psychological and neuropsychological tasks and experiments. It remains unknown whether differences exist in the semantic associations of words from childhood to adulthood, possibly indicating important lexico-semantic developmental changes that influence neuropsychological assessment. The present study compared semantic word associations in children and adults in terms of forward associative strength and set size. The participants included 247 children from the third grade of elementary school, aged 7 to 11 years (M = 9.17 years, SD = 0.83 years), and 108 adults, aged 16 to 49 years (M = 22.17 years, SD = 6.04 years) from the study of Salles et al. (2008). The task consisted of the participants responding to the first word that came to mind (associate) with a meaning related to each of 87 words presented aloud (target). The children’s responses had significantly higher forward associative strength between the target and most frequent associate word and a smaller response diversity index. Although the meaning and total set size did not significantly differ between groups, 40.2% of the targets had a large meaning set size in the children compared with only 10.3% in the adults. Among the most strongly associated pairs, 56.3% were equal between the sample groups. These results suggest that the selection of stimuli for the construction of verbal cognitive tasks should consider specific word association norms for different ages.