A table of Japanese nonsense syllables was already standardized by Umemoto in 1950 (1). But association values of Umemoto's table are generally too low, and it is very difficult to memorize a list taken from the table. So we measured anew the association value and meaningfulness of all possible Japanese two-letter pure-sound syllables. As our new tables contain many meaningful words, we thought it would be more convenient to express the index as 100-association value, and we called it non-association value. Furthermore the number of associated words per syllable were computed, and we called this the index of meaningfulness of the syllables. This index is the same as that of Noble (2).
Subjects were 975 boys and girls of high schools in Kyoto city. The time allowed for association task was ten seconds per syllable. 1892 syllables were divided into 40 subtables. One and same control list was given to all groups of Ss for testing the homogeneity of groups, and according to the results some conversions were made.
To test the validity of these tables, and experiment was conducted. Materials were three lists of seven pairs each, with alphabet capitals on the stimulus side and the syllables from our tables on the response side. The non-association values of response syllables were 0-4, 25-29 and 50-54. Ss were university students. Exposure time was two seconds. Anticipation method was used. Results showed as in Fig. 3 and Table 5, that the higher the non-association values, the more trials were needed to reach the criterion.