REACTION TIMES AND THE STRUCTURE OF ASSOCIATION
MASAMICHI KAWAHATA · The Japanese journal of psychology · 1979
A word-association experiment in which the reaction time was controlled was performed to examine how the structure of association changes as a function of reaction time. The main results were as follows. (1) In the case of adjective stimuli, when the reaction time was short, most of the response words belonged to the same grammatical category as the stimulus words; the so-called paradigmatic associations were dominant. When the reaction time was long, the response words were predominantly those that could be syntactically combined with the stimulus words; the so-called syntagmatic associations were dominant. (2) In the case of noun stimuli, regardless of the length of reaction time, the response words were predominantly of the same grammatical category as the stimulus words. That is, the dominant mode of association for the nouns was not syntagmatic but always paradigmatic. The paradigmatic association for the nouns differed in its contents and functions from that for the adjectives.