The effects of psycholinguistic variables on the behavior of associative processes

The psycholinguistic variables — word frequency, age of acquisition and etc. — affect the human’s processing of information. In this paper, we explore the effects of the four psycholinguistic variables — word frequency, age of acquisition, word familiarity and imageability — on the associative processes, that is, on the probability that words will appear as the associations for verbal stimuli; this probability isestimated by association abundance (the amount of different stimulus words which elicit these associations in the associative dictionary). The study is done using 286 words for which ones there are normative data for all variables. The main goal of this study is to find out the independent effects of each abovementioned psycholinguistic variables on association abundance. This is done by determining whether the including of one of the psycholinguistic variables as an additional predictor in the regression equation where the criterion is association abundance and the predictors — some other psycholinguistic variables leads to the significant increasing of the efficiency of the prediction. The received results show the independent effects of word frequency and age of acquisition on association abundance (the increasing of the efficiency of the prediction is significant, p<0.001 in both cases). These effects for word familiarity and word imageabilityhaven’t been detected.

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