Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Empirical Insights into Language and Cognition, Prof. Dr. Bilal Kırkıcı, Editör, Nobel Yayın Dağıtım, Ankara, ss.1-33, 2025
This chapter investigates word associations in the bilingual mental lexicon of Turkish-English speakers, comparing them with L1 English users and exploring the influence of word type, lexical frequency, and word level (i.e., lexical proficiency according to CEFR levels) on these associations. While existing literature suggests L1 users favour paradigmatic relations and L2 users, especially at lower proficiency levels, tend towards syntagmatic relations, this study examines these assumptions within the understudied context of Turkish as an L1 and English as an L2. A word association task is employed to investigate the responses from L1 Turkish-L2 English bilinguals. To provide a comparative baseline, data from the "Small World of Words" semantic association database is also analysed, representing L1 English association strengths and frequencies. The experimental stimuli consist of 20 high and 20 lower-frequency nouns and adjectives, carefully controlled for concreteness and cognateness, while verbs are excluded due to Turkish verb conjugation complexities. By examining the potential influence of word type (nouns – adjectives), cue word frequency (high – low according to British National Corpus), and word CEFR level on lexical associations, this research aims to contribute to psycholinguistic models of bilingual mental lexicon organisation from a different angle and offer insights for language practitioners regarding vocabulary acquisition and development in L2 English.