Norms of semantic association for 88 portuguese words

Abstract

Norms of semantic association have been internationally researched for more than one century, although they are recent in Brazil. These norms are important tools for tasks that evaluate memory and language. In this research, 108 undergraduate students produced the first word that came to mind, related in meaning to each one of the 88 target words presented before. Association strength between the pairs of words and the set size of the target were analyzed. The majority of pairs presented strong or medium strength of semantic association. The mean of total and meaning set size were, respectively, 37,56 and 12,40. Negative correlations were observed among association strength and set size. The concreteness of targets had a positive correlation with association strength and a negative correlation with total set size. Thus, it can be inferred that the bigger the target set size, the weaker the strength of association between pairs. Keywords: Semantic association; norms; word lists; association strength; concreteness.