The University of South Florida free association, rhyme, and word fragment norms

Preexisting word knowledge is accessed in many cognitive tasks, and this article offers a means for indexing this knowledge so that it can be manipulated or controlled. We offer free association data for 72,000 word pairs, along with over a million entries of related data, such as forward and backward strength, number of competing associates, and printed frequency. A separate file contains the 5,019 normed words, their statistics, and thousands of independently normed rhyme, stem, and fragment cues. Other files provide n x n associative networks for more than 4,000 words and a list of idiosyncratic responses for each normed word. The database will be useful for investigators interested in cuing, priming, recognition, network theory, linguistics, and implicit testing applications. They also will be useful for evaluating the predictive value of free association probabilities as compared with other measures, such as similarity ratings and co-occurrence norms. Of several procedures for measuring preexisting strength between two words, the best remains to be determined. The norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.