Exploring demographic differences in a large-scale study of Spanish wordassociation norms: The role of age, gender, and nationality
Abstract
Free association techniques, which involve listing the first word that comes to mind after a probe word (e.g., probe wordDOG eliciting response BONE) are powerful tools in the cognitive sciences. However, their validity and generalizabilitydepend on the total sample size and the diversity of the participant pool. We report a large-scale free association normingstudy conducted in Spanish, the most widely spoken and geographically diverse romance language, using the methodologylaid out by De Deyne and colleagues (2019, BRM). Our results include 1 million responses to 5,000 cues from 20,000participants. Using our norms, we explored how the demographic factors of age, gender, and nationality shaped responses.We observed that between 12-18% of cue-response pairs varied systematically based on these demographic factors. Ourresults illustrate how free associations can reveal broad similarities and systematic demographic differences in lexico-semantic structure.