Exploring the Chinese Mental Lexicon with Word Association Norms

Exploring the Chinese Mental Lexicon with Word Association Norms Oi Yee Kwong Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics City University of Hong Kong Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong Olivia.Kwong@cityu.edu.hk Abstract Our internal repository of words, often known as the mental lexicon, has primarily been modelled by psychologists as some kind of network. One way to probe its organisation and access mechanisms is by means of word association techniques, which have rarely been applied on Chinese. This paper reports on the design and implementation of a pilot word association test on native Hong Kong Cantonese speakers. The test contains 500 stimulus words, carefully selected and controlled on important factors including word frequency, part-of-speech, syllabicity, concreteness and vocabulary type. The resulting association norms based on 58 participants reveal interesting properties of the Chinese mental lexicon, such as the dominance of disyllabic and nominal concepts, and collocational associations. Despite its current small scale, the word association norms obtained from this study do not only offer first-hand psycholinguistic evidence for investigating the Chinese mental lexicon but also provide a useful resource to inform future studies in Chinese lexical access, lexical semantics and lexicography. 1 Introduction Humans know tens of thousands of words, and their language behaviour suggests that the words are systematically organised and efficiently accessed in their internal word repository, often known as the mental lexicon. For a long time, psychologists have hypothesised the mental lexicon as a massive network of inter-connected nodes. The organisation and access mechanisms of the mental lexicon have primarily been studied with experimental approaches, using a variety of tasks like lexical decision, semantic verification, word association, etc. Despite some intrinsic weaknesses, word association techniques offer first-hand psycholinguistic evidence of our mental lexicon especially for revealing the extensiveness of the network and the different kinds of semantic associations among concepts in it. However, large-scale association norms obtained from native Chinese speakers comparable to those in English and other languages are lacking. This study, as a pilot attempt, intends to produce a set of word association norms from native Hong Kong Cantonese speakers, to complement other experimental methods and offer more insight for further studies on the Chinese mental lexicon. Hong Kong Chinese is our focus in this study. Written vocabularies from Modern Standard Chinese and spoken vocabularies from the Cantonese dialect are supposed to co-exist in the mental lexicon of its speakers. It is therefore theoretically and practically interesting to explore how such mixed forms, together with other Chinese-specific factors like logographic meanings, syllabicity and the fuzziness of the word notion, as well as other general factors like word frequency, part-of-speech, concreteness and polysemy, shape the organisation of the Chinese mental lexicon. Stimulus words were thus chosen carefully and systematically, with due consideration for the various important factors. The resulting word association norms are expected to shed light on a wide range of research questions on the Chinese mental lexicon, some of which are particularly addressed in the current study:  What is the basic unit in the …

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