Word Associations from Preschool Children Collected by the Continued Sentence Associations Method *

Abstract

In the first of two studies a new method of collecting word associations, Continued Sentence Associations (CSA), was compared with Continued Associations (CA), a representative of more conventional methods. Using young children as Ss, the CSA method has 3 advantages over conventional association methods: (a) CSA seem more natural for children than CA; (b) CSA permit associative measures from young children for parts of speech other than nouns and adjectives; (c) CSA allow analyses of sequential dependencies, grammatical structure, optimum positioning of specific words in a sentence, and frequencies of regularly occurring phrases. In the second study CSA were collected from 27 young children for 157 frequently occurring words. The data in this study may be of practical value to persons who design beginning reading materials.

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