What is it about?
"Eat" is an example of a transitive verb, since it can have an object (e.g. "eat fish"). "Backfire" is an intransitive one, because it usually does not. Does this grammatical distinction affect the way that people respond when words like these are given as cues in a word association task?
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Why is it important?
Linguists want to know how words are stored in the mind. What kind of information about words - their spelling, pronunciation, meaning, or their grammatical information, for instance, are stored together? This is valuable in part because it helps us to understand how we learn languages in the first place, and how that storage changes over our lifespan. Word association is one way of analysing the storage of this type of knowledge. The types of words that people give as responses in the word association task can tell us about how we store these words. So by looking at 1) IF transitivity affects word association responses, and 2) HOW that effect manifests itself, we can make deductions about the storage of words.
Perspectives
The findings in this paper challenge some earlier papers which used smaller groups of people and fewer words. The findings raise interesting questions about the influence of grammatical knowledge, word meaning, and collocation patterns to word association.
Peter Thwaites
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This page is a summary of: Does verb transitivity influence word association responses?, The Mental Lexicon, December 2020, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/ml.20019.thw.
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