Word association research and the L2 lexicon

Since its modern inception in the late nineteenth century, research on word associations has developed into a large and diverse area of study, including work with both applied linguistic and psycholinguistic orientations. However, despite significant recent interest in the use of word association to investigate second language (L2) vocabulary knowledge and testing, there has until now been no systematic attempt to review the wider word association research tradition for the benefit of second language-oriented researchers and practitioners. This paper seeks to address this, drawing together linguistic research from the past 150 years, with a focus on research published since 2000. We evaluate the current state of L2 word association research, before identifying methodological and theoretical themes from a broader range of disciplinary approaches. Emerging from this, new paradigms are identified which have potential to catalyse a new phase of work for second-language word association scholars, and which indicate priority foci for future work

Are word association responses really the first words that come to mind?

Word association has been a popular tool for research in linguistics and psychology over the last century. The paradigm presents participants with a cue word and asks them to respond with the first associated word that comes to mind. Inferences about the structure and organisation of the lexicon have been made on the basis of the findings of word association tasks, and on the assumption that responses reflect the strongest link between words in the participants' vocabulary. The procedure adopted in traditional word association tasks does not guarantee that this is the case. This paper presents two experiments that aimed to determine whether or not participants make deliberate and strategic responses in word association tasks. Findings indicate that word association responses are likely to reflect the first word that participants activate in their lexicon. Keywords : psycholinguistics, Methodology, Word association, Working memory, Lexical organisation

О истакнутим асоцијативним истраживањима на Западу у 21. веку и могућностима њихове примене у (домаћој) лингвистици

удући да су домаћа асоцијативна истраживања досада била окрену-та Истоку и руској традицији, циљ је овог прегледа да прикаже нашој јавности мање позната, а изразито занимљива западна истраживања, која би могла по-служити овдашњим лингвистима у будућности. Асоцијације се примењују у више грана друштвених наука, али овде ћемо се усредсредити на области најближе домаћим истраживачима и на њихова достигнућа: удруживање асоцијативног метода с корпусима и његово коришћење како би се олакшала претрага речника; примена овог метода како би се изградили модели менталног лексикона; асоција-ције у примењеној линвгистици, у анализама везаним за усвајање страног језика

Visualization of Jacques Lacan’s Registers of the Psychoanalytic Field, and Discovery of Metaphor and of Metonymy. Analytical Case Study of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”

We start with a description of Lacan’s work that we then take into our analytics methodology. In a first investigation, a Lacan-motivated template of the Poe story is fitted to the data. A segmentation of the storyline is used in order to map out the diachrony. Based on this, it will be shown how synchronous aspects, potentially related to Lacanian registers, can be sought. This demonstrates the effectiveness of an approach based on a model template of the storyline narrative. In a second and more comprehensive investigation, we develop an approach for revealing, that is, uncovering, Lacanian register relationships. Objectives of this work include the wide and general application of our methodology. This methodology is strongly based on the “letting the data speak” Correspondence Analysis analytics platform of Jean-Paul Benzécri, that is also the geometric data analysis, both qualitative and quantitative analytics, developed by Pierre Bourdieu

Word upon a word : parallelism, meaning, and emergent structure in Kalevala-meter poetry

This essay treats parallelism as a means for articulating and communicating meaning in performance. Rather than a merely stylistic and structural marker, parallelism is discussed as an expressive and cognitive strategy for the elaboration of notions and cognitive categories that are vital in the culture and central for the individual performers. The essay is based on an analysis of short forms of Kalevala-meter poetry from Viena Karelia: proverbs, aphorisms, and lyric poetry. In the complex system of genres using the same poetic meter parallelism transformed genres and contributed to the emergence of cohesive and finalized performances

“Word upon a word” : Parallelism, meaning, and emergent structure in Kalevala-meter poetry

Peer reviewe

Lexical and distributional influences on word association response generation

This thesis is the result of an attempt to investigate the determinants of word association responses. The aim of this work was to identify those properties of words – their frequency, grammatical class, and textual distribution, for example – which influence the generation of word association responses, and to align these effects with wider sycholinguistic views of the mental lexicon. The experimental work in the early chapters focuses on grammatical influences on wordassociation. In particular, it is demonstrated that both grammatical class and verb transitivity influence the type of response most likely to be selected by participants. The immediately following chapters ask why this would be so. The analysis of several models of word association suggests that the development of a clearer understanding of the way in which a word’s textual distribution impacts upon associative response patterns may be an important stepping stone towards a coherent model of associative response generation. In the later part of the thesis, a series of novel experiments is conducted comparing word association response patterns with corpus-derived data. This work in turn lays the foundation for the development of a new usage-based model of word association, which is shown, in the penultimate chapter, to be capable of explaining a wide range of research findings, including not only the grammatical class and transitivity-related findings described above, but also earlier findings relating to the influence of lexical variables on the structure of the associative network, and to the discovery of individual and age-related response patterns in word association

Can humain association norm evaluate latent semantic analysis?

This paper presents the comparison of word association norm created by a psycholinguistic experiment to association lists generated by algorithms operating on text corpora. We compare lists generated by Church and Hanks algorithm and lists generated by LSA algorithm. An argument is presented on how those automatically generated lists reflect real semantic relations