ABSTRACT
One of the key methods used to gain insight into the organization of the mental lexicon relies on eliciting and evaluating associations between the target (stimulus) word and other items in the lexicon. This technique, the word association task (WAT), has a long tradition in second language acquisition studies. The traditional approach used in vocabulary acquisition research usually takes into consideration the number of WAs (word associations) produced, speakers’ response times and the lexical, semantic and phonetic connections between the stimulus word and its associations. The corpus-based approach relies on information about word frequency and collocations in language use to explain the WAs and evaluate the integration of the target words in the lexicon and to offer explanations for trends in WA activation. In order to demonstrate the use of these two analytical approaches to word associations as a window into vocabulary acquisition, the chapter investigates the acquisition of new, specialized lexis through first (L1) and second (L2) language from academic reading—these approaches are, in principle, complementary.
