About
This data was collected by Jasmine Metcalfe as part of her MA TESOL dissertation work, supervised by Tess Fitzpatrick, in 2018. The data comprises responses to 100 cues from ten blind and ten sighted participants. The cues were selected to represent higher (n=70) and lower (n=30) imageability scores. They were read to participants, who replied with the first word they thought of. This data was collected in order to address research questions and hypotheses such as:
- In what ways, if any, do the lexical networks of blind individuals systematically differ from those of sighted individuals?
- Hypothesis: the word-associations of blind and sighted individuals will be less similar for highly imageable words, and vice versa, in that the association responses of blind and sighted participants will be more similar for less imageable words.
- Hypothesis: sighted participants will produce a larger variety of responses, and this similarly may be more noticeable for words with higher imageability ratings. Specifically, it is predicted that the visual characteristics associated with lexical items, such as colour terms, will be the fundamental basis of any disparity caused.
Please cite the information and data on this page as: Fitzpatrick, T., Mills, T., and Morris, S. (2025). Finding, Sharing and Losing Words: Understanding the Mental Lexicon [Metcalfe, J. (2018) Comparison of the Lexical Networks of Blind and Sighted Individuals: A Preliminary Investigation]. Swansea University. https://mental-lexicon.swansea.ac.uk/.
Data
By downloading the following file, you agree to use this dataset under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.
| File | Link |
| Blind and Sighted Word Association Data | Dataset.xlsx |
Acknowledgments
This data was collected by Jasmine Metcalfe for her MA TESOL dissertation, supervised by Tess Fitzpatrick.