“Word association games” is a common word game, as the name says it. This involves the exchange of words that are associated together generally. Such word games are usually based on the activity of simulation of the word by an associative pattern. It means that the connection and production of the other words from a word given already. This is a pretty spontaneous and creative game using techniques to evaluate. There could be a lot of word association activities for the kids or the elders to get them to involve and evolve.
Thinking is all about making these connections in your mind by using the brain. These word connection games can be played with 2 or more players. Works well as a conversation starter to break the ice between people in a large group. Could be played while in a car, while drinking with friends or in the office during the breaks. Playing such games with your kids instigates them to think and use their brain to make it quicker. Kids really learn a lot from such word association activities and also gives them an experience of having fun with words. Try it out, they love it.
Let’s learn How to Play Word Association Game:
There has to be an original word at the start always. So, pick any base word randomly or arbitrarily.
- The next player will find a word that they can associate with it and say it aloud to all the other players OR write it on the board for other players to read.
- The next player must then follow the same process and find an associating word to the previous word.
- This continues for any length of time but good to set limits. For example, if you reach 300 words, then there you stop.
Usually, a player might say the next word by merely thinking about the first word that comes to their mind however, they may as well put some more thought into it to come up with a more creative connection between the words. Word connection games turn out to be very interesting in this aspect.
Let’s speak about a few examples here and tell you how to go about it:
- If the first word is “coffee”, you could get the next word as “vacation” and so on. This game could go on for a week too to complete.
- Another example of how word association lists go on: “Cat” , “Dog” , “Fur” , “Coat”, “Bone”, “Skeleton”, “Murder”, “Cops”, “Crime”, “Drugs”, “Night”, “Dark” , “ Light”, “Sky” …. The crux is to let the ideas flow and make it interesting or funny!
- One more: “Bag”, “Leather”, “Kill”, “Snake”, “Venom”, “inject”, “Syringe”, “Needle”, “Stitch”, “Style”, “Rip”, “Poor”, “Beg”, ….. The word association list can go on to infinity here.
Let us see how can we have variants to this word association game list:
In some of these games, there could be few extra rules or limitations added to make it versatile. For instance,
- The word following the previous one must be strictly related and obvious, rather than the basic usual “this is the first thing that popped up in the mind” which can often require some explanation to see how it connects and relates to the word previous to it.
- Word Disassociation (also called as just Dissociation (R) can be played. Where the aim concentrates to word that is as unrelated as possible to the previous word. In such case, obviously, the creativity bit is lessened and makes not much sense too. Also known as a “Word for Word” game.
- There cannot be repetitive words or if they do, then the relation to the previous word could differ. For example – “Dog”, “Cat”, “Goat”, “Coat” (Which means the fur is being used to make coats) “Penguin”, “Ice”, “Snow”, “Coat” (repeated coat to mean that it is cold and you wear coats in winters or during snow)
- A rule that can involve the associating word in a grid. Which means the first word is written at the top-left, and then each word is placed adjacent to one another. The words adjacent must associate to all the other words adjacent to it.
- Take a long word and form words using the alphabets from the long initial word. For instance, “ENCYCLOPEDIA”. Set a timer (Say for 1 minute) and note all the words that come into your mind using the alphabets present in this base word. Like “Eye”, “Cycle”, “Pen”, “Pee”, “Pea”, “Load”, “Cyclone” etc.
How do these word connection games help, the psychology behind it:
It is said that the word association activities can reveal something about a person’s behavior or the subconscious (R) mind. It shows what are the varied things that they associate with. However, many are skeptical of how effective these activities could be in a reading the mind.
Often, you observe while playing these games, that, there are erratic links between the words and end up surprising other players as to where did the thought come at all? “How do you manage to end up with such an association” – this would be the common most reaction that comes up!
There are many kinds of research ongoing to ensure that in the word games a company’s names are being associated with the right message. For instance, a market research back in the 1950s they tested the word “lager” for a brewery. While others associated the word with “beer”, “dizzy”, “tired” and so on. As a result, the client decided to not use the word.
There were some theories in early years of psychology where the doctors included hypnotism and dream analysis as part of their treatment. Then gradually the psychologists thought that there might be a link of person’s I.Q. with the word association technique. For example, if you say “cat”, the next word that pops into your mind is “dog”. This indicates that you associate dogs with cats and a very common association. The psychologists could judge the person’s ability to perceive by the amount of time that an individual takes to come up with an association word. It could be because the individual is bogged up with too many thoughts and cannot decide to show up just one or the response could be “inappropriate” to be said. These would show up on the facial expression of an individual too.
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