Quantitative Analyses of Word Association by Korean Learners of English

The present study investigated the relationship between the quantitative features of L2 learners' word association and their L2 proficiency by using a word association test which adopted a time-constraint method. Forty-six Korean subjects (23 advanced and 23 intermediate level L2 English learners) along with twenty-three native speakers of English participated in an experimental study. The results of the study showed that: 1) L2 proficiency is positively related with the total number of responses that L2 learners can produce for a stimulus word in a given amount of time; 2) L2 proficiency is positively related with the degree of group response commonality; and 3) no positive correlation in the proportion of paradigmatic and syntagmatic responses is found between the advanced and intermediate L2 groups. It is also discussed that the proposed time-constraint method better reflects subjects' potential capacity to produce associations than traditional methods.