Query of Word Association Norms

Word associations are created by participants who are asked the first word (response) that comes to their mind when presented a word (stimulus). For example, given the stimulus BOOK, they might answer READ or PAGE. Each participant is asked to produce only a single associate to each word, but the databases show the aggregated results of many participants.

You can query two databases of word association norms:

Edinburgh Associative Thesaurus (EAT)

This is a set of word association norms created in nineties. Unfortunately the original web site (http://www.eat.rl.ac.uk/) for querying the associations is not available anymore, but the original association data is still available in json format. There are 8 210 different stimuli, including some numbers and expressions.
We produced an XML version of the original data in 2010.

University of South Florida Free Association Norms (USF-FAN)

This is database of free associations collected in the United States in the eighties. More than 6,000 participants produced nearly three-quarters of a million responses to 5 018 stimulus words. The data is still available.
We produced an XML version of the original data in 2010.

Use the interface

After choosing the association database with the radio-button, a stimulus word can be typed in the text box below and the responses are displayed in the table on the right with the number of persons who gave it as answer. The table on the left are the stimuli that would give the word in the box as response. The total number of stimuli/response is displayed in the title of the column. Clicking one of word in the stimuli or responses table, inserts it in the query box.