A STUDY OF INTER‐ AND INTRALINGUAL ASSOCIATIONS IN ENGLISH AND GERMAN¹

Abstract

Free associations and eight types of restricted associations were obtained to 40 nouns from 24 American students of German under four conditions: EE, GG, EG and GE (where English (E) and German (G) are stimulus and response languages, respectively). Because many interlingual responses were translations or partially identical with the stimuli their interlingual variability was lower than that of the intralingual free associations. Interlingual responses were primarily, paradigmatic whereas intralingual responses were syntagmatic. The variabilities of all interlingual and of some intralingual restricted associations were larger than those of free associations. The overlap between different types of restricted associations was markedly higher for the second than for the first language. In the interpretations, classes of possible responses were compared with “subjective” response preferences and sets.

Word association patterns: unpacking the assumptions

“…Lambert and Rawlings 1969; Lambert 1972) saw a shift in the application of word association tools from the domain of psychology and L1 linguistics study to investigations into bilingualism. The work of Riegel and his colleagues, especially Riegel and Zivian (1972), pushed ahead in this direction with a ground‐breakingly detailed exploration of intra‐ and inter‐lingual association behaviour. This early research has been steadily supplemented over the last few decades with L2 word association studies falling into two broad categories.…”

Word Association in L1 and L2

“…The assumption from these and similar studies (Albrechtsen et al, 2008 ;Riegel & Zivian, 1972 ;Wolter, 2002 ) is that the number of responses made in a particular category can provide information about the organization, availability, and salient features of words and their concepts in the mental lexicon. This fi ts well with the widely accepted working metaphor of the lexicon as a network of word-nodes linking in particular ways with each other.…”

Multicompetence and L2 users' associative links: being unlike nativelike

“…First, such a claim would predict similar strength of associative communality across different languages, which was not found to be the case even across several European languages (e.g. Lambert and Moore 1966;Riegel and Zivian 1972;Rosenzweig 1961;Ruke-Dravina 1971). Secondly, if association were based entirely on contiguity, then NSs' WA patterns would be dominated by syntagmatic links (broadly speaking, links between words of different lexical classes that may naturally co-occur in strings), which was not found to be the case with adult NSs of English.…”

“…Besides, only a few studies (e.g. Kolers 1963; Lambert and Moore 1966; Riegel and Zivian 1972; Rozenzweig 1961; Ruke‐Dravina 1971) have looked at the extent to which each of L2 users' languages contributes to their associative links, and even fewer have compared responses in English to responses in other languages. The results of this line of analysis painted an interesting picture.…”