Free associate norms for 139 European Portuguese words for children from different age groups

The present study presents normative ratings of free association for 139 European Portuguese (EP) words for 8-, 10- and 12-year-old children attending the 3rd, 5th and 7th grades of elementary and middle school in Portugal. For each word, five indices are presented: a) the percentage of associates, b) the strength of the first associate, c) the strength of the second associate, d) the distance between the first and the second associates and e) the percentage of idiosyncratic responses. Additionally, grade-level frequency values for each word from the ESCOLEX database (Soares et al., in press) are also provided. As expected, the results revealed developmental changes in the knowledge organization of children, ocurring at the age of 9-10 (5th grade) and remaining stable in 11-12 year-old children (7th grade). Specifically, we observed a decrease in the percentage of associates and idiosyncratic responses as well as an increase in the strength of the first and the second associate from the 3rd grade to the 5th grade. Moreover, the comparative analysis with the previous work of Carneiro, Albuquerque, Fernandes, & Esteves (2004) on EP and Macizo, Gómez-Ariza, & Bajo (2000) on Spanish for a subset of common words (16 and 58, respectively) shows that the present norms fit well with previous EP data but differ from Spanish data. The normative values can be downloaded at http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/about/databases or at http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.
This work is part of the research projects “Bilingual semantic processing: a study with cognate words by using different learning methods” (PTDC/PSI-PCO/104671/2008) and “Procura-PALavras (P-PAL): A software program for deriving objective and subjective psycholinguistic indices for European Portuguese words” (PTDC/PSI-PCO/104679/2008), funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) and by Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional (FEDER) through the European programs Quadro de Referência Estratégico Nacional (QREN) and Programa Operacional Factores de Competitividade (COMPETE). The authors thank Pedro Macizo for allowing us to use their normative data for 58 Spanish words with the purpose of comparison with the EP data. We also thank Isabel Padrón and Álvaro Iriarte for helping us with the classification of children’s responses as a function of syntagmatic–paradigmatic typology.