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Kiriakí Palapanidi

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece

 

Abstract

Word associations are investigated to shed light on the structure of the bilingual mental lexicon. It has been found that the linguistic level in the foreign language (FL) affects the word association responses in lexical availability tasks. Additionally, according to the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994), FL word association responses are mediated through the first language (L1), with stronger mediation observed in low proficiency learners compared to high proficiency learners. To explore these issues further, a semantic fluency task was conducted using the stimulus “Fruits and vegetables”. This study examined and compared the word connections between the stimulus and the responses provided by 62 Greek learners of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) of different proficiency levels according to CEFR (27 at the A level and 35 at the B level) in both their L1 and the FL. To analyze quantitative and qualitative aspects of the word associations found within each linguistic level in each language, the total number of responses and the total number of different responses in every set of responses were counted. Furthermore, the elicited answers were classified based on Precosky´s (2011) taxonomy of word associations. To find evidence of L1 mediation, common words produced in both the L1 and the FL were identified, indicating translation from the L1. The findings of this research primarily provide evidence of quantitative differences among the word associations of the two sets of answers and support the mediation of the L1 in both linguistic levels in the FL.

 

Keywords

Bilingual mental lexicon, Greek learners of Spanish as a foreign language, organization of mental lexicon, words associations