Abstract
This study examined lexical cognitive word associations of Bahasa Indonesia native speakers. A word association task using 30 cue nouns was conducted with 45 educated adult native speakers of Bahasa Indonesia aged 20–29, after which the generated data was classified based on the extensive semantic taxonomy. It was found that most responses related to the cue words were associated with lexical features, followed by entity features, situation features, taxonomic category, and introspective features, all of which suggested that this group of Bahasa Indonesia speakers related words to other words that shared similar lexical features, and especially with words that usually come after the target words. It was also found that the participants rarely associated feelings to the cue words as there were very few introspective feature associations. While this was a limited study focused on a specific population and only used nouns, the results could be of assistance in developing dictionaries and thesauri, or could be used as preliminary data to build databases, such as WordNet in Bahasa Indonesia. As there have been few studies focused on Bahasa Indonesia word associations, this study could also be used for future comparative word association studies.
Highlights
Research in Social Sciences and Humanities Conference 2018 (APRiSH 2018), which was hosted by the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universitas Indonesia, in Jakarta, Indonesia, 13–15 August 2018
Language and cognition studies have found that understanding these concepts and word associations can give some indication as to how these are stored in the memory, and sociolinguistic studies have examined these word and concept associations to understand how lexical items are understood in different cultures and languages, including Bahasa Indonesia
Word associations are subject to the culture of the speaker of a certain language since, as Pranoto and Afrilita (2018: 30) stated, "the mental lexicon develops according to the events experienced by the language learner." For example, the word candle for Bahasa Indonesia would not be connected to church as most Indonesians are Moslem, so this word would be more likely associated with power failure — a situation when Indonesians use candles to light the room
Summary
Words are used to label concepts that are understood by others who speak that language. Word associations are subject to the culture of the speaker of a certain language since, as Pranoto and Afrilita (2018: 30) stated, "the mental lexicon develops according to the events experienced by the language learner." For example, the word candle for Bahasa Indonesia would not be connected to church as most Indonesians are Moslem, so this word would be more likely associated with power failure — a situation when Indonesians use candles to light the room. The associated words from native Bahasa Indonesia speakers could be seen as prototype definitions and could be used by lexicographers to assess a word's meaning in the speakers' minds based on prototype theory. It is intended that the current study could assist lexicographers develop better definitions by revealing the associated concepts in the minds of Bahasa Indonesia speakers. As words can be related to other words in many ways, to understand the relationships between the cue and the participant associated words, the semantic taxonomic coding adapted by De Deyne and Storms (2008) was used
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