Format. The data in Appendix D are formatted as a text file with columns separated by commas so it can be opened directly in columnar format in StatView or Excel. The file can also be opened in Word or in BBEdit but the items will be separated by commas instead of columns.
Data. Appendix D provides the idiosyncratic responses for each normed word, that is, it provides the responses given by only one subject. The file contains three columns of data. The first presents the cues, the second presents their idiosyncratic responses, and the third presents the probability of response production by a single participant. The number of idiosyncratic responses was calculated by subtracting the number of different responses produced by two or more subjects from the total number of different responses produced in the group (respectively, MSS and TSS in Table 1). Given this measure, participants produced 111,157 idiosyncratic responses which comes to an average of 22.15 such responses per normed word. On average, more idiosyncratic responses are produced than responses given by two or more participants. This production was highly variable across different words, ranging from 1-73 responses with a standard deviation of 10 words. However, we hasten to note that only 111,026 idiosyncratic responses are reported in this appendix because some were missing as a result of errors of various types. Rather than spending weeks tracking down the errors, we are simply reporting what we have.
As noted earlier in this report, at the outset of this work we thought that idiosyncratic responses would tend to be "off the wall" so they were not included in the database. Specific idiosyncratic responses did turn out to be unreliable (Nelson & Schreiber, 1992), but interestingly our reliability studies indicated that the total number of idiosyncratic responses produced in response to a given word was highly reliable. In other words, when the same word was normed a second time, about the same number of idiosyncratic responses are produced each time except they tend to be different words. We have now seen enough of these responses to believe that most are very weakly related responses. As noted earlier, the free association procedure seems to provide a reliable index of the strongest associates of a word but not of its weakest associates. In any case, idiosyncratic responses are provided for nearly all of the normed words in Appendix D in case someone wants to study or use them in research.