earticle

영어

This paper, titled “Word Association Research Methods”, reports on a comparative questionnaire conducted by 200 native Koreans and 200 native Chinese who are requested to answer an associative word within ten seconds per question. The result was explored according to each
language: 1) Analyzing associative words indicating paradigmatic and syntagmic relationship from a linguistic viewpoint 2) Analyzing the meanings and features from social and cultural viewpoint; and 3) The meaningful interpretation was carried out by comparing and contrasting
the character of the two languages.
In this questionnaire, the analysis of words association was conducted by using only six words, which were ‘hobby’, ‘appear’, ‘happen’, ‘broad’, ‘afraid’, and ‘beautiful’, out of twenty words.
Approximately 55% of Koreans and 44% of Chinese replied kinds of ‘hobby’in response to the question ‘what word makes you think of ‘hobby’’. ‘Talent’, a word of high frequency in word association has represented the feature of social class well. ‘Disappear’, which has the
opposite meaning of ‘appear’, is a word of high frequency in word association of ‘appear’.
When seeing any words, Koreans associated them with negative circumstance or objects. However, in case of Chinese, it was vice versa.
Chinese presented ‘appear’ as a word association of ‘happen’. Considering ‘miracle’ is associated many times as a word association of ‘happen’ as well as a word association of ‘appear’, Chinese have strongly recognized ‘happen’ and ‘appear’ as having a meaningful
relationship than have Koreans. A meaningful analysis result was achieved for the given words ‘broad’ and ‘beautiful’.
Unlike researches have done before, which have studied word association from linguistic viewpoint, this findings are significant in that the research involved two groups from different languages and cultures comparing word association. Such a research might also be effectively
applied to the communication and lexicon education of Korean learners.