STUDYING CONTROLLED WORD ASSOCIATIONS 397 



due to the word order in the English language. Since the normal 

 sequence for subject, verb, object is seldom varied, it is natural 

 that associations between them should be in the order of subject- 

 verb and verb-object. If the reaction time should prove to 

 be equal for these associations in their normal order, it would 

 follow that by reversing one association, for instance the subject- 

 verb to the verb-subject, this reaction time would be longer 

 than for the verb-object association. This is what the results 

 here show. It is probable therefore that the English word order 

 accounts for the relative value of the reaction times for the verb- 

 subject and verb-object associations. 



2. For both types of verb associations the reaction time on 

 the average increases directly with the number of syllables in 

 the stimulus word. The explanation for this is probably the 

 same as for the same finding for adjective-noun and the noun- 

 adjective associations, that is, it is due to the increasing un- 

 familiarity and complexity of meaning of a word with the in- 

 crease in the number of its syllables, rather than to the actual 

 increase in the time taken to speak the longer words. 



EXPERIMENT II 



A more detailed study of the adjective-noun and noun-adjective 



association 



From the results of the previous experiment it was possible to 

 secure a revised list of adjectives, nouns, and verbs, forming a 

 lexicon of words suitable to the types of associations outlined 

 above; to take an equal number of each group for further trial 

 on a large number of subjects and investigate in greater detail 

 the same problems studied in experiment I. The lexicon 

 was compiled for each of the four groups of words and will be 

 later published separately but lack of time prevented any further 

 investigation into the verb-subject and verb-object associations. 

 The first task was to eliminate unsuitable words. These were 

 found to fall into the following classes: 



1. Unfamiliar words beyond those already eliminated in mak- 

 ing up the original lists. Throughout experiment I there was a 



