INVESTIGATING THE WORD ASSOCIATION BEHAVIOR OF PERSIAN SPEAKERS: THE CASE OF IRANIAN CHILDREN AND ADULTS

Throughout the years, word association methods have established themselves as valuable resources for gaining knowledge in various domains of research. This study, therefore, was an attempt to compare and contrast the word association behavior of children and adults in Persian language. To this end, 24 four to six-year-old children recruited from a day care center and 23 undergraduates studying at an institute of higher education in Shiraz, Iran were given a single-response free word association test. The analysis of the responses to the word association test revealed that both age groups had an inclination towards generating syntagmatic responses, and the concrete stimulus words elicited more syntagmatic responses than the abstract words; Moreover, in all word class types under scrutiny (e.g., nouns, adjectives, and verbs), syntagmatic responses outnumbered the other three types of responses. The findings of this study bring into question the generality of the syntagmatic/paradigmatic shift phenomenon for a language like Persian.