An investigation of the effect of free association strength on the learning of syntagmatic word pairs

Abstract

The present experiment was conducted to examine the effect of free association strength (FAS) on the learning of noun phrases (NPs) and verb phrases (VPs). The experiment also examined whether NPs or VPs of various FAS levels function as do single nouns or verbs when used as responses in a paired-associate task. The stimuli were nonsense syllables and the responses were either single nouns, single verbs, NPs, or VPs. The phrases were high FAS word pairs, low FAS word pairs or nonassociated word pairs. For NPs, the high FAS phrases were learned with fewer errors than the low FAS phrases and nonassociated phrases, and the low phrases were learned with fewer errors than the nonassociated phrases. For VPs, no difference was found between the high and low phrases, but both the high and low FAS phrases were learned with fewer errors than the nonassociated phrases. High FAS noun phrases functioned like single nouns. The low FAS noun phrases and nonassociated noun phrases did not function like single units. For VPs, both the high and low FAS phrases functioned like single verbs, while the nonassociated verb phrases did not.