Friday, November 30, 2012

The Small World of Words

Neuroskeptic posted recently about this online project called "The Small World of Words," which is an effort to create the largest word-association database ever by having lots of people complete this interactive exercise.

They show you fourteen words, one at a time, and you type in the first three words that come to your mind in the three empty fields below the prompt-word. 

If nothing comes to your mind, you're supposed to type "no response." I had one word where that happened (the word was "grief", and instead of seeing an image I could describe, or a color, or hearing the word echo and mutate into various sound-alikes, I actually felt an attenuated version of grief itself), so I entered that into all three fields.

They do want everyone taking the test to be a fluent English speaker, but other than that there are no restrictions. And you can be from anywhere, and you don't have to be a native speaker --- just fluent.

Probably, if your English is good enough for you to be reading this blog, you can participate in this study.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for posting about this - it was absolutely fascinating. It inspired a blog post of my own, which I haven't finished yet because I ran out of time, but yeah. Thank you. That was really cool.

Lindsay said...

Yay! I'm glad you took it, too. I think the project rocks and the more people who contribute to it, the more awesome it will end up being.

Josh said...

I just launched another project on word meaning (spec. verb meaning), which takes a different look at meaning that the SWoW project (we investigate components of meaning, rather than associations).

You can find the project here and read the project announcement here.