About NALC!

University of Salamanca's Spanish Free Association Norms

Free association is “a task that requires participants to produce the first word to come to mind that is related in a specified way to a presented cue (e.g., meaning, rhyme, makes a word) (Nelson, McEvoy & Dennis, 2000). Historically, it has been one of the main methods to infer how conceptual knowledge is represented in memory, as it provides important information on the organization and processes of the human cognitive system. Free association norms have been used with a multiplicity of research objectives, ranging from word selection for priming experiments (Duñabeitia, Carreiras, & Perea, 2008) to the modeling of abnormal priming in Alzheimer’s patients (Borge-Holthoefer, Moreno, & Arenas, 2011), and from the study of semantic disturbances of verbs in Parkinson’s desease (Herrera & Cuetos, 2013) to the assessment of the preconceptions of students about specific topics (Bucklin & Daniel, 2017). Due to the utility of free association norms, and the absence of large-scale normative data in Spanish, we started to collect responses for a large set of words, 16 years ago. This Web Page is the end of the story…so far.
We collected free association norms for 6,739 words (currently, norms available for 6489) from a total of 2,305 young students (mean age = 19.6) in a period of 16 years. Paper and pencil booklets were used (mean word set=250) in which participants wrote the first word that came into mind after reading each cue word (discrete association task). The set of normed cues is composed of words that have been extensively normed in other psycholinguistic dimensions, and therefore constitute a strongly characterized stimuli pool for use in cognitive research. All responses were manually transcribed to configure the largest free association database over the world: NALC - Normas de Asociación Libre en Castellano (University of Salamanca Free Association Norms).

Actually, the database contains 294,638 cue-target word pairs (90,887 with frequency > 1) characterized by a set of indexes (see table 1) that reflect associative properties (mostly the same reported by Nelson, McEvoy & Schreiber, 2004).

CUE

Normed Word

TARGET

Response to Normed Word

NORMED?

Is Response Normed?

Available for each pair CUE-TARGET

FSG

Forward Cue-to-Target Strength

BSG

Backward Target-to-Cue Strength

MSG

Mediated Strength

OSG

Overlapping Associate Strength

#M

Number of Mediators

MMIA

Number of Non-Normed Potential Mediating Associates

#O

Number of Overlaping Associates

OMIA

Number of Non-Normed Overlapping Associates

Available for CUE & TARGET

ACCE

Accessibility Index (Global probability of been produced)

SS

Set Size

FR

Frequency

CON

Concreteness

PS

Part of Speech

MC

Mean Connectivity Among Its Associates

PR

Probability of a Resonant Connection

RSG

Resonant Strength

UC

Use Code
Access to the NALC is open (CC BY-NC license) to interested researchers via Internet, with a user-friendly interface that allows for on-line search, filtering and data extraction in real time. NALC will also be part of a large web app that will integrate most of the Spanish language normative studies. The size of the stimuli set and the relevance of the available data makes the norms particularly useful for research in disciplines such as linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychology or artificial intelligence. Explore NALC and if you need help use the "help" option in each page (not iplemented yet)