Psychometric Experiments 143
over, that the words were divisible into three distinct groups. The first contained “abbey,” “aborigines,” “abyss,” and others that admitted of being presented under some mental image. The second group contained “abasement,” “abhorrence,” “ablution,” etc., which admitted excellently of histrionic representation. The third group contained the more abstract words, such as “afternoon,” “ability,” “abnormal,” which were variously and imperfectly dealt with by my mind. I give the results in the upper part of Table III., and, in order to save trouble, I have reduced them to percentages in the lower lines of the Table.
TABLE III.
COMPARISON BETWEEN THE QUALITY OF THE WORDS AND THAT
OF THE IDEAS IN IMMEDIATE ASSOCIATION WITH THEM.
|
Number
of words
in each
series. |
|
Sense
Imagery |
Histrionic |
Purely Verbal. |
Total |
|
Names
of
persons |
Phrases and
Quotations |
|
26 |
"Abbey" series |
46 |
12 |
32 |
17 |
107 |
|
20 |
“Abasement”,, |
25 |
26 |
11 |
17 |
79 |
|
29 |
“Afternoon” ,, |
23 |
27 |
16 |
38 |
104 |
|
75 |
|
|
|
|
|
290 |
| |
“Abbey” Series |
43 |
11 |
30 |
16 |
100 |
|
“Abasement” ,, |
32 |
33 |
13 |
22 |
100 |
|
“Afternoon” ,, |
22 |
25 |
i6 |
37 |
100 |
We see from this that the associations of the “abbey” series are nearly half of them in sense imagery, and these were almost always visual. The names of persons also more frequently occurred in this series than in any other. It will be recollected that in Table II. I drew attention to the exceptionally large number, 33, in the last column. It was perhaps 20 in excess of what would have been expected
