Japanese and American association structures

Abstract

The free word associations of 258 Japanese college women were compared with associations of 258 American college women to the same 80-word list. Subgroups in each sample evidenced the same four idiodynamic associative sets: Perceptual referent, Object referent, Concept referent, and Dimension referent. Orthogonal rotated-factor structures were similar. The distribution of set “types” among Japanese women, however, was markedly different from that of the American women. The import of this variable incidence of idiodynamic sets in different populations was discussed with special reference to traditional word-association commonality tables. It was concluded that instructions in the free-word-association experiment tend to evoke a set to produce personal association hierarchies, but that the set to communicate tends to activate (in the same person) a more general association hierarchy, one more closely resembling the hierarchy depicted in traditional word-association commonality tables.