Association network(s) in a multilingual mind

Abstract

On the basis of the data obtained by means of association tests, the tentative answers to the reseaech questions can be supplied: (a) types of links activated by the subjects during an automatic retrieval of the grammatical words: dominance of lexical connections made via translation or conscious metalinguistic comments, observed in the case of frequent but grammatically complex items (b) types of associations: no form focused associations are present in the data; predominance of the paradigmatic associations in all languages (synonyms and antonyms); frequent syntagmatic associations (collocations) in L2 test (transfer of training: function words taught in phrases); translation equivalents as most frequent responses in grammatically complex items; high percentage of zero answers (compared with content words retrieval; Gabryś, 1999: 8) (c) factors affecting the type of retrieval: apart from the factors mentioned earlier such as language proficiency or language dominance, it seems that the degree of semantic transparency activates conceptual links, while grammatical complexity activates lexical links, often in a form of consciously made metalinguistic comment (d) other observations: in terms of word categories, it can be observed that in paradigmatic associations, stimulus words of one word category yield responses of the same kind, i.e. pronouns are associated with pronouns, prepositions with prepositions etc., which is true of both single language tests and mixed ones. What is more, in some cases the subjects mix languages (code switch), however, the responses produced are still within the same category'. It can be tentatively concluded that grammatical words are stored within the boundaries of the same grammatical categories, which is different from content words’ retrieval in the case of which word category boundaries are more flexible (Gabryś, 1999). (fragment tekstu)