Exploring the Chinese Mental Lexicon with Word Association Norms

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.