Combining corpus linguistic and psychological data on word co-occurrences: Corpus collocates versus word associations

Abstract

It is desirable to combine corpus linguistic and psycholinguistic methods and data types to illuminate the phenomenon of word co-occurrence. However, it is not only the cases where parallels between corpus linguistic and psycholinguistic findings are found that prove significant. In this study, it is shown that there are fewer parallels, and far more differences, between corpus collocations and word association responses than has been previously assumed. For instance, word association responses are typically semantically related to the stimulus word and belong to the lexical word classes, neither of which is typically true of collocates of the same node word in a corpus. The conclusion drawn is therefore that the word association task does not reflect authentic language production, but should rather be seen as tapping into the semantic information of the mental lexicon only.