Tarvajeh: Word Association Norms for Persian Words.

Abstract

In recent years, word associations have played a key role in cognitive research. The goal of this study is to propose a new system called Tarvajeh to construct and analyze the association norms found in the Persian language. In this paper, we present Tarvajeh, a data set for Persian words in a continuous word association task. For data collection, cue words have been categorized into groups and then, 30 of them were presented to each participant in two phases. Afterward, the participants were asked to write the first three words that are related to the initial cue words. After data collection, Tarvajeh included 240 frequent Persian cues and more than 20,000 different responses. Furthermore, we also propose a method that allows participants to compare their responses as well as their subconscious mind with those of their peers using a unique graph that is tailored to their responses and is displayed to them. Finally, we compared our data with those of associated words in other languages. The comparison reveals that, for some cues, most associated words are the same, while for others, the most frequent responses are unique within each data set. In addition, some gender-related differences were observed with male participants spending more time on their responses than female participants.