Linguistic association experiment. Association experiment as a method for studying meanings

After the 20th century, the experimental method came to linguistics. It opened up new possibilities for studying the patterns of language activity and made it possible to create the necessary situations. On the ridge new wave an associative experiment arises. The psychological dictionary interprets this term as a way of studying the motivation of an individual. The purpose of this technique is to find associations that were previously formed in a person.

Scientists have identified 3 varieties of it:

1. free (the subject answers with the first word that comes to mind, without restrictions on semantic and formal characteristics);
2. directed (with restrictions in the selection of words depending on part-sentence, gender, number, etc.);
3. chain (generally similar to free, but has its own characteristics).

The division of associations into syntagmatic and paradigmatic is widespread. In the first case, the stimulus and response belong to different parts speech, in the second - on the contrary. Genus-species relationships are also taken into account. Pay attention to antonymic and synonymous pairs.

Free associations

The simplest of the methods in this series. It operates according to the “stimulus-response” scheme. First arose in psychiatry, then migrated to other areas social activities. It is still used to detect schizophrenia, because patients with this disease find rather strange connections between words.

Scientists have put forward a hypothesis about the grouping in the human mind of all names into complex formations called associative fields. Everyone has them, but they are strictly individual in content and strength of connections. This can be noticed when they are updated during the response. This affects the type of activity, place of residence and age. For a conductor, the “brush” is smooth, for a builder it is hairy, for a resident of Moldova it is grape-like, and for a nurse amputation comes to mind.

Directed Associations

Indispensable when you need to find deep and unstable connections. The researcher gives the subject a task with restrictions, cutting off the path to generally accepted answers. For example, in 2 out of 3 cases, a Russian-speaking person will choose the antonym “hot” for the word “cold”. Directional enhancement is acceptable. It is enough to give the stimulus “the water is cold.” Here, with a probability of up to 90%, the answer will be “hot water.” Unnecessary associations (such as “warm day” and “cold day”) are cut off. You can narrow the focus even further by suggesting finding the opposite for the phrase “cold water in the kettle.” It is noteworthy that with a 90% probability for “cold water in the sea” the answer will be different - “warm”.

In this way, one can obtain many different results, reveal deep associative connections, and find a comprehensive approach to the study of linguistic activity and its mechanisms. The technique of continuing unfinished sentences is a subtype of directed experiment. Widely used in psychodiagnostics. Particularly indicative is the selection of adjectives to nouns (the water is cold, blue, blue, dirty, etc.).

Chain associations

This experiment involves finding the maximum number of words in a limited time (often 1 minute). There is a spontaneous, uncontrolled reproduction of the contents of the subconscious and consciousness of the subject. The researcher pays attention to the structure of the produced series. But there is still a significant drawback that breaks the system. The subject may move away from the original stimulus and begin to make associations to his own previous answer. When the instructions are followed exactly, the listed words are combined into several semantic nests according to their meaning.

The association experiment became widespread in the twentieth century as a method for studying group and individual human consciousness. The effectiveness of its use in various fields is ensured by the following:

• The automatic nature of associations;
• The connection between the process of associative experiment and physiological reactions of a person;
• Low level people management abilities.

Due to this, many types of associative experiments and typologies of associations were formed, which are necessary to obtain specific, accurate results.

The method of associative experiment in psychology is quite firmly established in late XIX V. One of the types of methods aimed at studying personality is the association test, based on the concepts of reaction and stimulus. The interpretation of the results obtained depends on the views of the researchers using the associative experiment.

IN social psychology an association experiment is used to determine the level of cohesion of groups, identify a leader in them, etc. In personality psychology, it is necessary to determine the psychosemantics of consciousness. In forensic science, this type of experiment makes it possible to identify true and false personal testimony.

Associative structures make it possible to reflect existing relationships between objects of reality and establish new connections, on the basis of which the process of object recognition occurs. This mechanism of association is characterized by indirectness, intimacy of associations, and their orientation towards sensory experience.

Methodology of associative experiment.

Among the methods of speech analysis, the associative experiment plays an important role, since it is used to analyze the level of speech development, erudition and vocabulary of the erudite. The traditional method of associative experiment divides speech analysis into two groups:

• direct methods - contain tasks that require linguistic knowledge from the subject. This method helps the subject give an informed answer regarding the most important signs various linguistic signs. Based on the results obtained, conclusions are drawn about whether a person’s individual data belongs to group norms. Direct methods for conducting an associative experiment may involve performing analytical type tasks;
• indirect methods - these methods do not require conscious reactions. Among them stand out the following groups methods:

• Psychophysiological methods – this group The indirect method is based on the correlation of primary and secondary signal reactions, such as registration of the salivary glands in response to stimulus words. If the reactions coincide, then adequate understanding and acceptance of semantic stimuli occurs. The lack of reactions indicates a distorted understanding of the characteristics of spoken words;
  • Associative methods;
  • Game methods;
  • Semantic differential methods.

Association experiment in psychology, according to the way it is carried out, it can be:

• Free - reactions are limited quantitatively - can be carried out both orally and in writing. The absence of restrictions determines the free nature of this experiment;
• Directed - reactions are limited qualitatively - this method is aimed at building a number of associations based on semantic grammatical characteristics;
• Chain - reactions are limited by the time of their generation - conducting an experiment in this way involves obtaining from the subject several associations for one given stimulus in a short period of time.

The importance of analyzing the results obtained during the associative experiment.

The answers received during the experiment are analyzed and divided into the following groups:

• Syntagmatic - in this group the grammatical classes of associations and stimuli do not coincide. Associations of this group are associated with speech relations.
• Paradigmatic - in this group, the grammatical classes of associations and stimuli completely coincide, as a result of which the actualization of reactions during the association increases. Associations of this group are associated with linguistic relations.

Methods of associative experiments have become widely used and significant in sciences such as psychology, sociology, psycholinguistics, etc. An associative experiment is carried out with a fairly wide range of subjects, which allows one to obtain good results. The results are most often used in the fields of linguistics to obtain data on the semantic distance between various word forms. Semantic proximity is calculated by the number of matching responses and the similarity of associations used in the experiment. Each researcher, when conducting an associative experiment and taking into account the results obtained, uses his own response value: “overlap coefficient”, “association coefficient”, “overlap measure”.

The particular importance of the associative experiment lies in highlighting the psychological component in the meaning of a word or object. Thanks to this there is real opportunity building the structure of a word. Based on experiments carried out in this way, it is possible to obtain the most valuable material, the so-called linguistic field, which is hidden in mental state native speaker and determines the semantic relationship of words. The main advantage of conducting an associative experiment is its convenience and simplicity, the ability to work simultaneously with a huge group of subjects. Associative reactions contain a certain important feature– possession of phonological and syntactic sensitivity to the level of the stimulus word. The phonetic association can be considered as semantic in subjects experiencing fatigue.

Linguistic association experiment- used to assess the qualitative specificity of thinking. The test is also used for psychoanalytic purposes, to study higher nervous activity. When conducting research, it is proposed to bring the first association that comes to mind to the presented words.

The association experiment is widely known and actively used in psycholinguistics, psychology, sociology, and psychiatry.

The emergence of the method of free verbal associations is associated with the name of Francis Galton (1822–1911). In 1879 he published the results of his association experiments. Inviting the subject to respond to the stimulus word with the first word association that came to mind, Galton compiled lists of 75 words and revealed them to the subject one by one (sometimes he himself acted as such). He used a stopwatch to record the response time.

There are several types of associative experiment:

1. Free association experiment. The subjects are not given any restrictions on their reactions.
2. Directed association experiment. The subject is asked to make associations of a certain grammatical or semantic class (for example, select an adjective for a noun).
3. Chain association experiment. The subjects are asked to respond to the stimulus with several associations - for example, give 10 reactions within 20 seconds.

Most researchers today tend to consider an associative experiment as a technique for studying the interests and attitudes of an individual. However, it should be noted that the interpretation of the results obtained is determined theoretical views researchers. Therefore, the question of the validity of the methodology cannot be resolved unambiguously without correlation with the theoretical positions of its creators.

Exist special dictionaries associative norms, J. Deese’s dictionary is one of the well-known ones. In Russian, the first dictionary of this kind was “Dictionary of associative norms of the Russian language”, ed. A.A. Leontyev.

Currently the most complete dictionary in Russian is the “Russian Associative Dictionary” (compiled by: Yu.N. Karaulov, Yu.A. Sorokin, E.F. Tarasov, N.V. Ufimtseva, G.A. Cherkasova). It includes the following parts: volume 1. Direct dictionary: from stimulus to response; v. 2. Reverse dictionary: from reaction to stimulus; Volumes 3-6 are also direct and reverse dictionaries of two other word lists. This dictionary contains 1277 stimuli, which is slightly less than the number of words that speakers use in everyday speech (1500-3000); 12,600 different words were recorded as responses, and in total there were more than a million reactions.

Experimental procedure. For a mass experiment, subjects are collected in one room, instructed and motivated. After this, stimulus material is distributed in the form of questionnaires containing a list of stimulus words. Then the experiment itself takes place, during which the subjects, for 10-15 minutes, next to each stimulus word of the questionnaire, write one reaction word that first came to the subject’s mind after reading the stimulus word. After this, the questionnaires completed by the subjects are collected. Typically, each subject is given 100 words and 7-10 minutes to answer.

Possible sets of words:

1. option: wardrobe -, city -, matchmaker -, branch -, feather -, sparrow -, rabbit -, candle -, frame -, road -, dress -, ink -, shoes -, cat -, tomato -, thread -, notebook -, sun -, pillow -, day -, board -, street -, saw -, pencil -, glass -.

Option 2: bread -, lamp -, singing -, wheel -, beauty -, war -, air -, development -, bell -, cave -, infinity -, moon -, brother -, treatment -, ax -, fall -, deception -, head -, doubt -, game -, goal -, depth -, people -, grass -, quarrel -, butterfly -, search -, sadness -, conscience -.

3. option: fire -, garden -, laughter -, forest -, red -, dress -, north -, love -, evening -, joy -, sleep -, bread -, business -, illness -, labor -, brother -, resentment -, thunderstorm -, husband -, spring -, table -, past -, honor -, space -, health -.

When analyzing the research results, the following are taken into account: latent period (normally from 0.5 to 2 s), quality characteristics answers.

Based on the quality of answers, speech reactions are divided into:

- higher speech reactions(generally specific, individually specific, abstract);

- primitive verbal reactions(indicative, consonant, refusal, extra-signal, interjection, perseverative, echolalic);

- atactic reactions(corresponding to dissociated thinking).

In patients with schizophrenia, ataxic (food - mole) or consonant (people - freak) reactions predominate. This is due to the characteristics of thinking disorders in this disease, consonance associations, etc.

The study is considered adequate if the highest speech reactions are 98-100%, among them general concrete - 68-72%, individual concrete - 8-12%, abstract - 20%, lower, ataxic and verbose reactions are absent.

Interpretation of responses

When analyzing the responses of an associative experiment, syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations are distinguished, first of all. When classifying associations, relationships that arise in the stimulus-response pair are usually considered. There are several classification methods.

J. Miller classifies reactions from the point of view of identifying semantic features, or parameters:

1. contrast (man - woman),
2. similarity (fast - fast),
3. submission (animal - dog),
4. subordination (dog - cat),
5. generalization (cucumber is a vegetable),
6. assonance (mouth - mole),
7. part - whole (day - week),
8. addition (forward - march), etc.

Charles Osgood distinguishes associations by consonance and meaning, noting that semantic features should be decisive. A.P. Klimenko shares the same point of view. She identifies the following types of associations:

1. phonetic, in which there is consonance between stimulus and response, but the semantic justification for the association is not expressed (or very weakly expressed) (day - shadow, flax - maple);
2. word-formative, based on the unity of the root of stimulus and reaction, but not reflecting clear and uniform semantic relationships between stimuli and reaction for different words (yellow - jaundice, yellow - bile);
3. paradigmatic associations that differ from the stimulus in no more than one semantic feature (table - chair, high - low, get - buy);
4. syntagmatic associations that, together with the stimulus, make up a subordinating combination (the sky is blue, the woman is beautiful, get it - a ticket, tall is a man);
5. thematic (salt - earth, dark - night);
6. quotation (old man - sea, white - steamer, uncle - Styopa);
7. grammatical (table - table, run - run).

Kent-Rozanov free association technique

Currently, a similar technique is known as the Kent-Rozanov free association technique. It uses a set of 100 words as stimuli. Speech reactions to these words are standardized to large quantities mentally healthy individuals, and the proportion of non-standard speech reactions (their relationship with standard ones) was determined. These data make it possible to determine the degree of eccentricity and unusual thinking of specific subjects.

And his followers assumed that uncontrolled associations are a symbolic or sometimes even a direct projection of the internal, often unconscious content of consciousness.

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Association experiment

Catatonia: Echolalia and associative experiment

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Experimental procedure

For a mass experiment, subjects are collected in one room, instructed and motivated. After this, stimulus material is distributed in the form of questionnaires containing a list of stimulus words. Then the experiment itself takes place, during which the subjects, for 10-15 minutes, next to each stimulus word of the questionnaire, write one reaction word that first came to the subject’s mind after reading the stimulus word. After this, the questionnaires completed by the subjects are collected. Typically, each subject is given 100 words and 7-10 minutes to answer. Often the experimenter dictates the stimuli.

Instructions for the test subject

Now you will receive a list of words, you will have to read sequentially word by word and write next to each word the first word that comes to your mind. At the same time, you must write extremely quickly, without hesitation; the speed of your reactions is a prerequisite for working in the experiment.

Varieties

1. Free association experiment.
2. Directed association experiment.
3. Chain associative experiment.

Interpretation of responses

When analyzing the responses of an associative experiment, syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations are distinguished, first of all. When classifying associations, relationships that arise in the stimulus-response pair are usually considered. There are several classification methods.

J. Miller classifies reactions from the point of view of identifying semantic features, or parameters:

1. contrast (man - woman),
2. similarity (fast - fast),
3. submission (animal - dog),
4. subordination (dog - cat),
5. generalization (cucumber is a vegetable),
6. assonance (mouth - mole),
7. part - whole (day - week),
8. addition (forward - march), etc.

Charles Osgood distinguishes associations by consonance and meaning, noting that semantic features should be decisive. A.P. Klimenko shares the same point of view. She identifies the following types of associations:

1. phonetic, in which there is consonance between stimulus and response, but the semantic justification for the association is not expressed (or very weakly expressed) (day - shadow, flax - maple);
2. word-formative, based on the unity of the root of stimulus and reaction, but not reflecting clear and uniform semantic relationships between stimuli and reaction for different words (yellow - jaundice, yellow - bile);
3. paradigmatic associations that differ from the stimulus in no more than one semantic feature (table - chair, high - low, get - buy);
4. syntagmatic associations that, together with the stimulus, make up a subordinating combination (the sky is blue, the woman is beautiful, get it - a ticket, tall is a man);
5. thematic (salt - earth, dark - night);
6. quotation (old man - sea, white - steamer, uncle - Styopa);
7. grammatical (table - table, run - run).

Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation

GOU VPO "Tyumen State University"

Psychology faculty

Department of General and Social Psychology

Report on the associative experiment method

Completed: student gr. No. 2963-1

Shatilov D.N.

Checked: Ph.D., Associate Professor of the Department

general and social psychology

Murzina Yu.S.

Tyumen, 2010

Introduction

The goal is to identify associative chains

Tasks:

1. Conducting an associative experiment to describe the human semantic space.

2. Comparison of associations for the concept “money” in men and women.

3. Classification of associations according to selected criteria.

Object - person

Subject – associative chains

Subject – male, 25 years old

Brief description of the method:

The closest thing to Freud's method of free association and Jung's directed association is association experiment. The general scheme of an associative experiment is close to the scheme of a behavioral experiment, but is not identical to it. A behavioral experiment is understood as an experiment in which a certain stimulus is applied to a subject under specially created controlled conditions, and the researcher records the response. The specificity is that the associative experiment is used only when working with people, and only those who, by age and condition, are able to understand and follow the instructions. There is an optimistic hypothesis that students fall into this category, but it needs further careful testing.

The procedure for conducting an associative experiment is as follows: the subject is presented with a stimulus word and is required to give the first associations that come to mind. The answer and, in the original version, the reaction time are recorded. It is noted that the response to affectively colored words - stimuli causes long delay in time than the response to neutral ones.

The association experiment has been used in many studies in domestic and foreign psychology. For a long time this method was the main research tool in the field of psychology of consciousness. Currently, it is also widely used due to its ease of implementation and fairly broad capabilities. It is used in the study of the processes of reflecting linguistic norms in psycholinguistics, in the study of stereotypes of mass consciousness in social psychology, in the diagnosis of affective, personally significant memory traces in psychodiagnostics and research individual characteristics thinking in differential psychology.

One of the first widely known was the classic experiment of J. Kent and A. Rozanov, in which one hundred subjects participated, giving answers to the word “chair”. The results raised many questions both about the reasons for the associations and about possible forms of conducting the experiment and analyzing the data. One of the most difficult questions so far is the classification of emerging associations, since the division into associations based on similarity, contrast and contiguity, which comes from antiquity, turns out to be insufficient and does not cover all possible options.

In Russia in the 20s, the method of associative experiment was actively used and modified by A.R. Luria and his students. A.N. Leontiev conducted interesting research, proposing the method of chain associative series. The essence of the modification was that not one word was recorded - the immediate reaction to the stimulus, but a whole associative series. In the preliminary series, based on Jung's method, the most inhibitory stimuli were identified, which then served as the initial stimuli of the associative series. The same subjects participated in several series. It can be noted that what happened in the experiment had a certain similarity with Freud’s method of free association, causing similar effects. Words that have caused an affective reaction cause ever wider associations, interrupted by inhibition, but the repressed content “As the number of sessions increases, complex groups grow, covering an increasing number of reactions. ... As already noted, we have here the process of verbalization of the complex, interrupted by its inhibition and transition to neutral reactions, which are then associated with new ones complex groups"(Leontyev, T.2. 1983. P. 70). His work shows that an associative series is some organic whole, in which “each link is not only connected with the two closest neighboring links. But it also directly determines both the subsequent and the previous link, being. In turn, it is self-determined general structure series" (Leontyev, T.2. 1983. P. 71).

For research purposes, an association experiment can be carried out with big amount subjects, and based on the associations they provide, a table of the frequency distribution of reaction words to each stimulus word is compiled. A measure of the semantic similarity of a pair of words is the degree of coincidence of the distribution of answers, i.e. the degree of similarity of objects of analysis is established through the similarity of the associations data on them. This value is found in the works of various authors under the name of intersection coefficient, association coefficient, overlap measure (Petrenko, 1988, p. 48).

In the works of J. Deese, Jenkins, Cofer, Bousfield and others, networks of associated words became the subject of research. This means that words that serve as stimulus and response to each other cause the appearance of a whole series of other words, which, in turn, can become stimuli and cause the initial pair of words in the form of a reaction. To characterize the connections between words, Dees introduced the concept of “associative meaning,” defined by the measure of coincidence of the associative series caused by these words. Thus, the word “butterfly” evoked the word “mole” as a reaction in 7 cases out of 50, the word “flower” - 6 times, “insect” - 6 times, “wing” - 5 times, the word “fly” - 4 times, and the word “moth”, the word butterfly - in 1, “insect” - 1, “wing” - 1, “fly” - 10. The frequency of association matches is 15/50.

The use of this method of counting makes it possible to construct a matrix of relationships between words, the associative connections between which are of interest. Such a matrix can be processed by factor analysis, which will make it possible to identify different nests of words that have common associations. Based on such nests, it is believed that the basic semantic categories of a language can be established. The factor analysis of the semantic connections of the word butterfly carried out in Deese's work showed that the associations that arise correspond to fundamental semantic features, such as, for example, living - nonliving. Considering the cognitive operations that appear to underlie the associative connections of words, Dees writes: “... to classify meaningful - that is, logical and syntactic relationships between words - we use two basic operations: contrast and grouping. We can establish the position of any given unit of language in some part of the vocabulary of that language by contrasting this unit with another element and/or grouping it with other elements” (Slobin and Green, 1976, p. 144). This principle was taken into account by J. Kelly when creating the methodology of personal constructs.

Emerging associations are determined by many factors - semantic connections within the language, characteristics of the subject’s affective complexes, characteristics social status and lifestyle. In one of the early studies by A.R. Luria showed the influence of the social environment on the number of associative connections of an individual. Thus, the connections that arise in the speech sphere of a village child are much more standard than in the speech of an urban child (Luria, 1979, p. 93). As many studies show, the nature of the associations also depends on the age, gender, educational level, and profession of the subject.

In some works, the disadvantages of the method include its sensitivity to phonological and syntactic similarity - that is, the appearance of associations associated primarily not with meaning, but with sound, the outer shell of the word. For example, words denoting the names of colors are associated differently than visual examples of the same colors (Petrenko, 1988, p. 49). In addition, special studies show that most of associations, formed speech stamps and clichés (Suprun et al., 1975). However, these data really reflect existing features ordinary consciousness - closeness to the sensory level and saturation with idiomatic forms, stereotypical, rigid formations, which ensures the unity of the individual and the group and facilitates social contacts.

The advantage of the associative experiment is its simplicity and ease of use, since it can be carried out with large group subjects at the same time.

Progress of the study:

1. The task is completed in pairs. One of the participants is the subject, and the other is the experimenter. The experimenter reads a word from the list, to which the subject must respond with the first other word that comes to mind. The experimenter records the answer and time.

List of words :

cat, apple, newspaper, shame, house, madness, chamomile, night, cucumber, river, book, dancing, hand, sport, nail, tape, death, circus, board, hat, horse, love, coffee, snow, flute, dollar, cup, face, tenderness, grass.

Results and its discussion

cat	2
apple	2
newspaper	2
a shame	2,2
house	2
madness	2
chamomile	2,1
night	2
cucumber	4
river	2,3
book	2
dancing	2
hand	1,5
sport	2,2
nail	2
ribbon	1
death	2
circus	3
board	2,4
hat	2
horse	1,5
Love	2
coffee	2
snow	1,5
flute	2
dollar	2
cup	2
face	3
tenderness	2,5
grass	2,5

Average response time: 2.12 sec