Free associate norms for 139 European Portuguese words for children from different age groups.
In the present study, we present normative ratings of free association for 139 European Portuguese (EP) words among 7- to 8-, 9- to 10-, and 11- to 12-year-old children attending the 3rd, 5th, and 7th grades of elementary and middle school in Portugal. For each word, five indices are presented: (a) the percentage of associates, (b) the strength of the first associate, (c) the strength of the second associate, (d) the distance between the first and second associates, and (e) the percentage of idiosyncratic responses. Additionally, grade-level frequency values for each word from the ESCOLEX database (Soares et al., in press) are also provided. As expected, the results revealed developmental changes in the knowledge organization of the children, which occurred at the ages of 9-10 (5th grade) and remained stable in the 11- to 12-year-old children (7th grade). Specifically, we observed a decrease in the percentages of associates and idiosyncratic responses, as well as an increase in the strengths of the first and second associates from the 3rd to the 5th grade. Moreover, a comparative analysis with the previous work of Carneiro, Albuquerque, Fernandez, and Esteves (2004) on EP and Macizo, Gómez-Ariza, and Bajo (2000) on Spanish, for the subsets of common words (16 and 58, respectively), showed that the present norms fit well with previous EP data, but differ from the Spanish data.
Human Cognition Lab, CIPsi, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Campus de Gualtar, 4710-057, Braga, Portugal, mvila@psi.uminho.pt.
Montserrat
M
Comesaña
Isabel
I
Fraga
Ana Júlia
AJ
Moreira
Carla Sofia
CS
Frade
Ana Paula
AP
Soares
D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D005608:Free Association; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D011174:Portugal; D011932:Reading; D012016:Reference Values; D013334:Students / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D014825:Vocabulary