Word Association ThesaurusThe Edinburgh Associative Thesaurus (EAT) is a set of word association norms showing the counts of word association as collected from subjects. This is not a developed semantic network such as WordNet, but empirical association data.
An interactive version and a downloadable version of the word association thesaurus are available below.
Interactive Associative Thesaurus
Enter a word in one or both boxes.
The EAT can be searched in two directions. You can enter a stimulus word and find the words that were produced in association to it; or you can enter a response word that was produced by subjects, and find the list of stimulus words which produced it as a response.
The EAT here is that included in the MRC Psycholinguistic Database, for use with the other measures available their.
The associations return the number of different answers, the count of all answers, and the list of triads of associated types, their individual frequencies, and proportion of occurrence. The proportion of occurrence for a given type is its individual frequency divided by the total count of all answers.
For example, if the word CAT is entered as the stimulus, the output starts as:
Number of different answers: 30
Total count of all answers: 95
This states that a list of 30 different answers will be produced, as a result of a total count of 95 people making responses to the stimulus word. The first of the words returned is DOG which has a frequency of 49, in that 49 of the 95 responses was this word DOG, and proportion of occurrence of 0.52 which is the 49 divided by 95 (rounded to two decimal places). The proportion of occurrence can be multiplied by 100 to provide a percentage, in this case 52% of respondents produced DOG as the response to the word CAT.
Data Collection Procedure - excerpted from:
Kiss, G.R., Armstrong, C., Milroy, R., and Piper, J. (1973) An associative thesaurus of English and its computer analysis. In Aitken, A.J., Bailey, R.W. and Hamilton-Smith, N. (Eds.), The Computer and Literary Studies. Edinburgh: University Press.
Since the objective was to obtain a reasonably large complete mapping of the associative network for a large set of words, a systematic procedure of 'growing' the network from a small nucleus was followed. At first responses were obtained from this nucleus set, then these responses were used as stimuli to obtain further responses, and so on. In fact, this cycle was repeated about three times, since by then the number of different responses was so large that they could not all be re-used as stimuli.
The nucleus set was derived from (a) the 200 stimuli used in the Palermo and Jenkins (1964) normq(6) the 1,000Inost frequent words of the Thorndike and Lorge (1944) word frequency counf and (c) the basic English vocabulary of Ogden (1954).
Data collection was stopped when 8,400 stimulus words had been used. Only a minimal amount of selection of stimuli was applied in each cycle of the data collection. Effectively all responses which were English words or meaningful verbal units mere included, inchlding some phrasal forms and numerals. The data cover a wide range of grammatical form classes and inflexional forms.
Each stimulus word was presented to 100 different subjects. Each subject recieved a computer-printed sheet with 100 stimuli in randomised arrangement (to minimize priming effects). The total contribution of each subject was thus 100 responses. The verbal environment of each word for each subject was different. The instructions asked the subject to write down against each stimulus the first word it made him think of, working as quickly as possible. the total time spent on this task was measured, and most subjects completed the sheet in five to ten minutes.
Most of the data was collected in a classroom setting nuder supervision. Sheets which had more than 25 percent blank responses were rejected and fresh data was collected.
The Edinburgh Associative Thesaurus is hosted by the Science and Technology Facilities Council as an unsupported service. If you have a problem with the database please contact Prof Michael Wilson (e-mail m.d.wilson@rl.ac.uk) although no response is guaranteed.
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