STUDYING CONTROLLED WORD ASSOCIATIONS 385 



List II Conduct 8 times 



List III Conduct 1 time 



Spirit 5 times 



Action 5 times 



List IV Conduct 2 times 



Spirit 4 times 



Action 2 times 



Condition 1 time 



Man 7 times 



Mind 5 times 



Nouns first day. Likes adjectives better than nouns ; nouns call up an 

 object with no particular emphasis on its qualities, while the adjective 

 can not appear without an object. Subject feels that the nouns are 

 going faster however. 



Tables 2 and 3. These tables show the total distribution of 

 reaction times for each of the four subjects who acted in the 

 adjective noun experiment. The reaction time has been divided 

 into steps of 100 sigma, and opposite each reaction time is re- 

 corded the number of cases for a particular group of words in 

 which the reaction time had a value lying between this particular 

 number of sigma and 100 sigma more. For instance, in table 2, 

 subject I, there are 16 reaction times of values between 1100 and 

 1200 sigma, for one syllable adjectives. All reaction times 

 greater than twelve seconds were arbitrarily discarded as failures, 

 and since the number of cases of very long reaction times was few 

 for most subjects, it was decided to bunch all cases of reaction 

 times lying between 4000 and 12,000 sigma. This accounts for 

 the number of cases listed opposite 4000 sigma sometimes being 

 much greater than the adjacent number of cases. 



These distribution tables bear out the results in table 1. On 

 the whole for any given subject, the maximum number of cases 

 for any group of nouns is at a higher reaction time than for ad- 

 jectives of the same number of syllables. The syllab^ variation 

 is not so perfect, but with greater uniformity among the number 

 of cases, the modes would probably follow the averages. 



These results have also been plotted into distribution curves, 

 which are shown in figures 1, 2, 3, 4. In each figure are given 



P8YCHOBIOLOQY, VOL. I, NO. 6 



