Welcome to the website Finding, Sharing, and Losing Words: Understanding the Mental Lexicon. The information and resources here focus on the use of word association data to investigate the mental lexicon. Click on the About tab for an introduction to word association research, and on the Resources tab to access talks, tools, and publications.
To facilitate further research and analysis, the website provides access to hitherto unavailable datasets and norms lists1. These datasets have been compiled according to research-driven protocols, controlling for specific respondent characteristics and cue word features. The data sets have been collected over a series of research projects, and our Finding, Sharing and Losing Words project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council2, has enabled us to curate and share them and the research they have generated to date, via this website.
You can use the menu above to learn about the project and our team, and find links to further information. You can explore for yourself the spreadsheets and visualisations of our word association datasets. Under the Resources tab you will find information about analytic methodologies, tools, and research literature that might be helpful to your own investigations. You can also access our outputs from this project, including presentations and posters.
There is citation information for each dataset/norms list on the relevant web page. If your citation is a general one, please use: Fitzpatrick, T., Mills, T., and Morris, S. (2025). Finding, Sharing and Losing Words: Understanding the Mental Lexicon. Swansea University. https://mental-lexicon.swansea.ac.uk/.
1 Norms lists are lists of participant responses to a cue word organised by frequency of occurrence among a participant group.
2 Project reference AH/Y003020/1. The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).
Unless otherwise stated, all content on this website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.
Thank you for your interest; we hope you find the webpages useful.