Free word association is driven by local response chaining of linguistic and sensorimotor relationships

Word associates are commonly collected and employed in cognitive and clinical research, yet the precise reasons why a particular word is activated as an associate for a given cue remain unclear. We examined the source of responses in a word association task using linguistic and sensorimotor relationships between words as measures of relatedness, in order to assess whether responses are more likely to be driven by the cue or by preceding associates. We asked participants to produce up to 20 associates for each cue and analysed the strength of relationships and latency for each response. Results showed that word association responses had strong effects of local response chaining, where a given associate was more likely to be related to the preceding associate than to the cue itself. In growth curve analysis of the timecourse of producing responses, we found little influence of the cue on response times. Instead, the strongest source of facilitation was the sensorimotor and linguistic relationship of each response with its immediately-preceding associate. These findings suggest that linguistic and sensorimotor information underpins word association mechanisms, whereby local chaining from the most recent response is the primary driver of which new associates are activated and produced. Results support the linguistic-sensorimotor basis of semantic memory as well as theories that people search memory using local rather than global constraints, with implications for using existing word association norms to investigate semantic memory structure and for the study of semantic relatedness in language production and comprehension.