Free-association norms for the Spanish names of the Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures

Abstract

[ENG]The questions addressed in cognitive psychology experiments often require the selection of linguistic and pictorial materials with specific objectively or subjectively determined characteristics. One way in which material selection can be adequately accomplished is by using indices empirically obtained in normative studies. Free-association norms are among the most frequently used normative data in cognitive research. The production frequency of a particular word as a free-association response to another word used as a stimulus is usually taken as an indication of the strength of the connection between the representations of the two words in memory (see Nelson, McEvoy, & Dennis, 2000, for a discussion on how to interpret free-association indices). Manipulations of the strength of these connections using the values provided in free-association norms have been proven to reliably affect semantic facilitation in priming studies (Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971), level of performance in free recall (Deese, 1959) and in cued recall (Nelson, McKinney, Gee, & Janczura, 1998), and false recall and false recognition of unstudied words (Roediger & Mc- Dermott, 1995), to name a few examples. Free-association norms for English words have been available for several decades, starting with the widely used norms for 100 words published by Russell and Jenkins (1954). Normative studies of this kind have continued to be regularly published (see Proctor & Vu, 1999, for a comprehensive listing), and currently there is an electronic database that provides norms for more than 5,000 words (Nelson, McEvoy, & Schreiber, in press). With regard to the Spanish language, the availability of this type of normative data is highly restricted. In the only published study, Macizo, Gómez-Ariza, and Bajo (2000) recently provided associative data for 52 words, but their sample included only children between 8 and 13 years of age. Freeassociation norms for adults were compiled by Algarabel, Sanmartín, García, and Espert (1986), but their database, although used by some researchers, has never been formally published or widely distributed. Given the scarcity of associative indices for words in Spanish, the main goal of the present study was to construct a free-association normative database based on the responses of a relatively large sample of Spanish-speaking adults to a set of words, which could be of interest to a variety of cognitive researches in our linguistic community. A set of materials for which there already exist data on a number of defining characteristics in Spanish consists of the pictorial stimuli originally normed by Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) for English speakers. Following this influential study, the pictures have been standardized in the basic dimensions of name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity in independent studies with adult samples in Spain (Sanfeliu & Fernandez, 1996), Mexico (Aveleyra, Gómez, Ostrosky, & Rigalt, 1996), and Cuba (Manzano, Piñeiro, & Reigosa, 1997). Other studies using Spanish-speaking subjects have provided additional normative data on this set of stimuli, such as word identification thresholds for fragmented names of the pictures (Reales, Ballesteros, & García, 2002) and their naming times and ages of acquisition (Cuetos, Ellis, & Alvarez, 1999). Taking into account the wide use of these pictorial materials and the availability of normative data for some of their important dimensions, in this study we decided to use the words that named them as the stimuli in a freeassociation task, with the aim of obtaining associative norms that could add to a more complete characterization of the materials in Spanish as well as provide corresponding norms for a sizable set of common words.