constrained the respondents to make judgements on each of the 24 verbs under study and only
on those verbs. The data from the four tasks were used to generate six expressions of the
similarity of the verbs to own. First, following Friendly's (1977) advice on semantic proximity
analysis, counts were made of the frequency of the recall of a verb adjacent to the recail of
own:
Briefly, this procedure locates subjective memory units on the basis of ordinal separation
or proximity between pairs of words in recall protocols. A proximity measure is developed
from the assumption that items which are coded together in subjective units will tend to
be recalled contiguously at the time of test. This assumption is entailed by all measures
of clustering and subjective organization. An item-by-item proximity matrix can then be
constructed with numerical entries representing the degree to which each pair tends to
occur in contiguous {though not necessarily adjacent) output positions over some set of
trials. (Friendly, 1977, p. 197)
A second, less restricted semantic proximity measure was made by counting the frequency of
recall of a verb in the same recall cluster with own, with cluster here being defined as a
respondent's entire recall production. A third measure was the frequency of mention of a verb
in the explanation of the meaning of own to a child. A fourth, and more restricted measure was
to limit this count to first-mentioned verbs. A fifth measure was the frequency with which a verb
was clustered with own on the card sort task. The sixth measure was the scaled judgement of
similarity to own.
Because assumptions of equal interval units and of metric equivalence between
respondents’ data would have been unwarrented, a rank-order transformation was done on each
respondent’s scores on each of the six measures. As is standard practice in ordinal ranking,
identical scores were assigned the average of the shared ordinal ranks. The computer program
to calculate the six measures appears in Appendix F, and the program to rank-order each
respondent’s scores appears in Appendix G.
The results of the recall task appear in Table 10. Generally, constrained free-recall was
not a successful research task for the population examined and the social contexts of the
research. Because Cree respondents objected to tape recorded responses, no audio record
of the temporal clustering of the recall responses could be made, and thus temporal clustering
in the recall sequences could not be examined. Many older Cree would elaborate on the
meanings and the usages of words as they recalled them. English-Canadians, on the other
— were commonly suspicious that the recall task was an IQ test and were discomfited by
perceived poor performance. The recall production of the Cree had a mean of 5.65 words
(S.D. = 2.20), which was significantly less (F =2.42, p <.01) than the English-Canadians’ mean