Enhancing word access in chinese dictionaries: Implications from word association norms

In addition to content and presentation, user-friendliness is gaining attention as an issue in the production of contemporary dictionaries. Electronic dictionaries, especially as they become accessible on the web and mobile devices, often capitalise on interactive user interfaces to enhance word access. Inspired by psychological models of human lexical access, one important direction is to expand navigational means by allowing word searches from a variety of associative relations. Although in practice it may only be feasible to extract various kinds of semantic links from large corpora, word association norms obtained from human subjects nevertheless remain a credible and useful resource for informing such corpus-based methods. This paper reports on a word association test with native Hong Kong Cantonese speakers and discusses the potential application of the resulting psycholinguistic evidence for enhancing the design of Chinese dictionaries, with particular focus on the relative significance of different association types with respect to the properties of individual words. © 2014 © 2014 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected].