Abstract

SALLES, Jerusa Fumagalli de; HOLDERBAUM, Candice Steffen  and  MACHADO, Letícia Leuze. Semantic association norms of 50 Brazilian Portuguese words for children: type, association strength and target's set size. Interam. j. psychol. [online]. 2009, vol.43, n.1, pp. 57-67. ISSN 0034-9690.

Lists of semantically-related words are fundamental when dealing with explicit and implicit memory experiments. The present study investigates the evocation of semantic associates to the 50 target words by 154 third grade children, analysing the strength and the type of association established, as well as the extension of the list generated to each target (set size). Among the results, the association strength average between the pairs was 29.44%; 50% of the pairs presented strong semantic association. It was found a preference for generating semantic responses of thematic type to the target words (76%); the average of different responses generated to each target (meaning set size) was 14.34 items and the abstract nouns generated a larger meaning set size. In addition, a strong negative correlation between the semantic association and the set size was also found. Concrete words, more prone to produce mental images, generated less variability within the responses when considered in the idiosyncratic responses analysis.

Keywords : Semantic memory; Associated pairs; Lexical evocation; Word`s semantic processing; Children.

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