strictly experimental conditions unnecessary. The test may be made in
any room that is reasonably free from distracting influences; the
subject is seated with his back toward the experimenter, so that he
cannot see the record; he is requested to respond to each stimulus
word by one word, the first word that occurs to him other than the
stimulus word itself, and on no account more than one word. If an
untrained subject reacts by a sentence or phrase, a compound word, or
a different grammatical form of the stimulus word, the reaction is
left unrecorded, and the stimulus word is repeated at the close of the
test.

In this investigation no account is taken of the reaction time. The
reasons for this will be explained later.

The general plan has been first to apply the test to normal persons,
so as to derive empirically a normal standard and to determine, if
possible, the nature and limits of normal variation; and then to apply
it to cases of various forms of insanity and to compare the results
with the normal standard, with a view to determining the nature of
pathological variation.



Sec. 2. THE NORMAL STANDARD.


In order to establish a standard which should fairly represent at
least all the common types of association and which should show the
extent of such variation as might be due to differences in sex,
temperament, education, and environment, we have applied the test to