The Word Sort: An instrument for semantic analysis

An objective instrument is developed which provides reliable psychological data with reference to semantic denotative features or components. The instrument, the Word Sort, is in the form of an individual word game in which Ss are instructed to arrange words into a number of groups according to some meaningful principle. Kinship terms were provided 21 Ss for dimensionalizing. Relatively high agreement among Ss was found with respect to the determination of semantic features.