"word association", vocabulary acquisition and neural networks

[LRC staff]

Back in the 1970s there was a dictionary called Slovar' associatyvnych norm
russkogo jazyka (or something like that). I was based on psycholinguistic
experimets on free associations. The dictionary provides the descriptive
statistics from the experiment.

Best,

Danko Sipka

>Question which may sound silly:
>
>Has there ever been a study done
>which takes an 'average' of
>"word associations" and used this
>information for teaching related
>vocabulary?
>
>Example:
>
>I'm learning Russian, and
>I would like to see the
>product of a native Russian's
>(or a whole bunch of native
>Russians) 'word association' -
>something like "happy",
>"sad", "mad", "glad", "sunny",
>"warm", "cold", "old", "bold",
>"mold", "mildew", "fungus" might
>be in English...
>
>There might be some words
>which rhyme, other words which
>are opposites, other words which
>are similar in meaning, some
>words which are the same
>amount of syllables, etc.
>
>I'm rather pedestrian, as far
>as language acquisition goes,
>but I tend to be "right brained",
>as they say, and am a big fan
>of the neural network concept of
>how the brain is mapped, and
>stores information.
>
>If anybody knows of anything
>like this, I would be quite
>interested.
>
>Thoughts?  Information?
>
>-Kenneth
>kenneth.udut at spcorp.com


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