About
This data was collected as part of an ESRC-funded project (RES-000-22-4012) led by Tess Fitzpatrick. The word association task was administered by a team led by Margie Wright at the Queensland Institute for Medical Research, Brisbane. The team were working on a large twin registry study led by Nick Martin, founder of the Australian Twin Registry.
For the word association task, 100 cue words were taken from the second and third most frequently occurring words in the British National Corpus. A written word association task was administered to 16-year-old twins (n=686) and 65+-year-old twins (n=143).
Following Fitzpatrick et al. (2015), the responses in the data sets below have not been edited or altered, except in cases of typos or misspellings where the intended response was clear.
Outputs related to this data include: Fitzpatrick, T., Playfoot, D., Wray, A., & Wright, M. J. (2015). Establishing the reliability of word association data for investigating individual and group differences. Applied Linguistics, 36(1), 23-50.
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 [Fitzpatrick, T., Wright, M. Word association in young and older twins]. Swansea University. https://mental-lexicon.swansea.ac.uk/.
Data
By downloading the following files, you agree to use this dataset under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.
| File | Link |
| Young Twins Dataset | Dataset.xlsx |
| Older Twins Dataset | Dataset.xlsx |
Acknowledgments
This was collected on behalf of Tess Fitzpatrick (PI) by researchers at the Queensland Institute for Medical Research as part of a project funded by the ESRC in 2011/12.