Word associations of French workmen: Comparisons with associations of French students and American workmen and students

Abstract

Summary Word-association responses were obtained from 115 French workmen in the construction industry. The stimulus list was a translation of the Kent-Rosanoff list, and it was administered as a group test. The primary responses to all 100 items are given, along with the percentage of Ss making each primary response. Several characteristics of the workmen's response norms were described and were compared with those of French students and American workmen and students: (1) The primary responses of the French workers are the same as those of the students in only 39 out of 98 cases. The American workers' primaries agree with those of the American students in 68 of 100 cases. The French students' primaries agree (in translation) with those of the American students in 48 out of 99 cases, which is more often than they agree with those of the French workers. (2) Within the same language, similarity of content based on all responses and not just the primaries was measured by means of group overlap coefficients. The mean group overlap coefficient for responses of French workers and students was 0.421. This is significantly lower than the mean coefficients for any of the other pairs of groups compared: American workers and students (0.521), American workers and professional men (0.534), and French men and women students (0.541). (3) The primary, secondary, and tertiary responses together account for 33.3% or all responses among French workers, 37.0% among French students, 54.4% among American workers, and 59.1% among American students. The index of communality ranks the four groups in the same order. (4) While French students, like students and workmen in the United States, usually respond with a word of the same grammatical class as the stimulus, the French workers, like children in both countries, frequently give responses of other parts of speech. Oppositeevoking stimuli account for much of the communality of responses of most adult groups, but this is not true of the French workmen. (5) Responses that are superordinates of the stimuli are given less frequently by French than by American Ss, and, in both countries, less frequently by students than by workers. It was concluded that adult members of the same “language community” may have verbal habits that differ systematically according to social groupings within the community.