A large-scale database of Mandarin Chinese word associations from the Small World of Words Project

Abstract

Word associations are among the most direct ways to measure word meaning in human minds, capturing various relationships, even those formed by non-linguistic experiences. Although large-scale word associations exist for Dutch, English, and Spanish, there is a lack of data for Mandarin Chinese, the most widely spoken language from a distinct language family. Here we present the Small World of Words–Zhongwen (Chinese) (SWOW-ZH), a word association dataset of Mandarin Chinese derived from a three-response word association task. This dataset covers responses for over 10,000 cue words from more than 40,000 participants. We constructed a semantic network based on this dataset and evaluated concurr..