Maria Telegina at the University of Tokyo has joined forces to kickstart the Japanese Small World of Words project. To mark the occasion, she wrote a blog post to give an update of the project (see below). The full post can be found here.

When you smell coffee, what picture appears in your mind? What do you feel? What time of the day do you imagine?

Distinctive smells like the smell of coffee tend to trigger strong associations. In the same way as the smell of coffee is associated with the process of waking up in the morning or staying awake during the day, words ‘coffee’ and ‘morning’ or ‘coffee’ and ‘break’ can be associated with each other.

Access to social, cultural, and semantic knowledge is the reason why word associations have been considered a source to get access to processes of the human mind and to model its conceptual structures for more than hundred years. The first examples of such use of the associations can be found in the works of such psychologists as Carl Jung and Francis Galton. For instance, Jung used word associations as a technique to get access to and then analyse the manifestations of subconscious of his patients.

The development of technology in recent decades has played a big role in the ways word association data are collected, organized, and studied. Today researchers all over the world can collaboratively learn various aspects of the human mind through analysis of word associations in different languages. A complex of these aspects is usually referred to as ‘mental lexicon’. Mental lexicon is also sometimes called one’s ‘mind dictionary’. Today the researchers can build large scale models of the mental lexicon and investigate its conceptual structure with datasets counting over 5 million responses, e.g. English Small World of Words

Though the approaches to the analysis of word associations have changed over the century, the typical task of a word association experiment remains the same – participants are asked to write down the first word(s) which come to their mind when they see a cue word. Such a word association experiment is usually called a ‘free word association experiment’, as the participants have the freedom to answer with any association they come up with.This simple task gives researchers material to investigate a great variety of features of the mental lexicon and make discoveries about memory, language development, creativity, and individual differences.

One such discovery is that the nature of the associations produced by the participants is interconnected with their age. This discovery was confirmed in works on associations in different languages, e.g. Portuguese, Japanese, Spanish. Research demonstrates that through our lifetime from childhood to adulthood, we don’t only grow our lexicon, we enrich our mental lexicon with new connections. In other words, we learn more words and we connect words more and more with each other when we grow up. Further observation of differences in responses of participants of different ages is thought to be a tool to learn about the development of and changes in the ways we understand and conceptualize things through the lifetime.

This and many more observations and further in-depth studies can only be conducted with sufficient datasets, giving the researchers a big sample from a different age, gender, education level, regional groups of participants. In the international project of Small World of Words, such samples have already been collected for English, Dutch and Spanish. Over 100, 000 volunteers took part in each of the projects. Moreover, the English project received the “Best Paper of the Year” award from the Psychonomic Society in 2019, and its data have already been downloaded by over 2000 researchers.

This fall we are starting a Japanese version of the Small World of Words project. In our project, we will investigate the features of the Japanese mental lexicon at the scale it has not been looked at before. Along with research on gender- age- region- based differences in Japanese native speakers’ word associations, the Japanese Small World of Words will document and investigate such fundamental concepts of the Japanese mental lexicon as time, space, emotions, human relations, and family. Plans for the future development of the project include cross-cultural and cross-linguistic comparison both in terms of the structure of the mental lexicon and of individual conceptual structures. In the long-term perspective, we are planning to create multilingual tools for science-based language learning support.

You can try the Japanese version of the Small World of Words. The word associations take only 5 minutes of your time. You might or might not learn something new about yourself, but what we do know is that your contribution to this study will help us to learn the nuances of the Japanese mental lexicon, its culturally specific features, and similarities with other languages.

Everything is better in 3D! Network visualizations provide powerful ways to convey a lot of information at once, but even with a small set of nodes they can become confusing quickly. To make it easier to explore the associations between words in a network, a new three-dimensional visualization method is now available. You can try it out yourself by clicking the visualize menu at the top of this page and selecting the 3D Network method under the options button ().

An example for the forward association network of word is shown on the right. The new visualizations are interactive. You can zoom and pan to change the view but also click on each word to center them. Similar to other visualizations you're able to search for multiple words at once by adding a comma between them in the search box. There's also an option shown for each network to animate it similar to the illustration.
The different colors correspond to clusters of words that are related in some way. The clusters (aka communities) are calculated for each network visualization and will thus depend on the search terms used. In the example, we see words with similar meaning like game, games, and play clustered together.

Feedback is always welcome but note that some of the features are still experimental and might not work on every browser. Interacting with the graph should work on a computer but might be less ideal on phones, tablets, or other touch devices. The functionality might be extended in the future to explore the networks in VR if I get a hand on a headset.
Credit goes to Vasco Asturiano for developing the 3d-force-graph library that's making this possible and to Corneliu Sugar for making the jLouvain community detection library available.

The Small World of Words project will be featured in the "Its my pleasure" digital installation by Owen Churches as part of the Hedonism Exhibition at the brand new Museum of Discovery (Mod) in Adelaide, Australia.

This installation explores the how recommendation engines affect our lives. Whether we are using them to navigate the news, find friends or digest dinner, there is a sense in which we are always asking for the algorithm to deliver us the same thing: our greatest pleasures.
To find out more, check out Owen's blog post or try out the digital installation online.

Entry to the exhibition is free and runs from May 2019 to November 2019. Check out the museum website for more information if you'd like to visit.

It is my pleasure to announce that the English Small World of Words (SWOWEN-2018) study is now published in Behavior Research Methods. It consists of 3.6 million word association responses to over 12,000 cue words. Nearly 90,000 volunteers have contributed to what is now the largest publicly available resource about the mental lexicon in English. It covers over 80% of the words we use in daily language, and hopefully we can increase that number in the coming years.
In the Behavior Research methods paper we explain how these data can be used to accurately predict how we process words and their meaning through a mechanism of spreading activation, in which meaning is derived by direct and indirect connections a word has with other words in networks similar to those you can visualize on this website.

Thanks again to all volunteers and colleagues who helped making this possible.

In the last few months, the Rio Platense project has been growing steadily. So far nearly 20,000 people have contributed to the first linguistic resource of this kind for Spanish speakers in Uruguay and Argentine.
If you speak Spanish you might want to learn more about the Rio Platense Small World of Words project by checking a new El Pais news article or listening to a broadcast from Sarandi Radio where you hear more from the lead investigator Álvaro Cabana.

This rich history makes Bahasa Indonesia is a unique language composed of words coming from different languages all over the world, such as Dutch, Arabic, and Portuguese. With these unique features, it will be interesting to compare the association network of Bahasa Indonesia with other languages.

The lead investigator on this project is Farah Djalal. Farah is an Indonesian lecturer and researcher from Bina Nusantara University, who is interested in her own native language and on how people use language to categorize objects. If you want to know more or have any questions (either in Indonesian or in English) please do not hesitate to get in touch: [email protected].

Selamat mencoba!