Lexical association network maps for basic Japanese vocabulary

Extending psycholinguistic research into the lexical representation of two-kanji compound words within the Japanese mental lexicon (Joyce, 2002, 2004), this paper reports on a large-scale word association survey for basic Japanese vocabulary. The database of word association norms, which is being compiled from various survey formats including a web-based version of the survey, supplements existing databases concerning the lexical features of Japanese vocabulary (Amano & Kondo, 1999; Yokoy m a a, Sasahara, Nozaki & Long, 1998), such as familiarity ratings and frequency counts, which are essential for cognitive science research. A particularly promising application of the word association norms data, however, is the creation of lexical association network maps that capture important proprieties of words and their interconnectivity. These maps complement other approaches that attempt to tap into aspects of lexical knowledge, such as WordNet, thesauri, ontologies, and collocation data, while avoiding some of their problems. There are also direct and interesting lexicographical and Japanese language learning applications of the