Since its modern inception in the late nineteenth century, research on word associations has developed into a large and diverse area of study, including work with both applied linguistic and psycholinguistic orientations. However, despite significant recent interest in the use of word association to investigate second language (L2) vocabulary knowledge and testing, there has until now been no systematic attempt to review the wider word association research tradition for the benefit of L2-oriented researchers and practitioners. This paper seeks to address this, drawing together linguistic research from the past 150 years, with a focus on research published since 2000. We evaluate the current state of L2 word association research, before identifying methodological and theoretical themes from a broader range of disciplinary approaches. Emerging from this, new paradigms are identified which have potential to catalyse a new phase of work for second language word association scholars, and which indicate priority foci for future work.

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Although several studies have investigated the influence of the grammatical class of cue words on response patterns in the word association task, relatively little is known about the influence of more fine-grained distinctions such as cue transitivity. The present study test investigated two predictions of the influence of this variable made in existing studies. The first is that cue transitivity would influence the grammatical class of responses; the second, that it would affect the directionality of position-based, or syntagmatic, responses. English language associative responses to 49 transitive and 49 intransitive cues were gathered from 53 English L1 respondents. These responses were then analysed according to their grammatical class and categorical designation. Results suggested that cue transitivity influences both of these measurements: transitive cues yielded more noun responses and more associations classified as likely to follow the cue in text than did intransitives, while transitives received more verb responses and more associations likely to precede the cue. These results are discussed in the light of contiguity-based and semantic theories of the determinants of word association.

Individuals are better at recognizing faces from their own ethnic group as compared to other ethnicity facesthe other-ethnicity effect (OEE). This finding is said to reflect differences in experience and familiarity to faces from other ethnicities relative to faces corresponding with the viewers' ethnicity. However, own-ethnicity face recognition performance ranges considerably within a population, from very poor to extremely good. In addition, withinpopulation recognition performance on other-ethnicity faces can also vary considerably with some individuals being classed as 'other ethnicity face blind' (Wan et al., 2017). Despite evidence for considerable variation in performance within population for faces of both types, it is currently unclear whether the magnitude of the OEE changes as a function of this variability. By recruiting large-scale multinational samples, we investigated the size of the OEE across the full range of own and other ethnicity face performance whilst considering measures of social contact. We find that the magnitude of the OEE is remarkably consistent across all levels of within-population own-and other-ethnicity face recognition ability, and this pattern was unaffected by social contact measures. These findings suggest that the OEE is a persistent feature of face recognition performance, with consequences for models built around very poor, and very good face recognisers.

In word association tasks, participants respond with the first word that comes to mind on seeing a given cue. These responses are generally assumed to be influenced by a number of factors, including cue semantics, form, and textual distribution. Previous studies exploring the third of these influences have used pairwise association measures, such as mutual information, to evaluate the extent to which textual distributions influence response selection. In the current paper, a different approach is taken. Rather than examining co-occurrences between a cue and its observed responses, this paper explores the possibility that the cue’s holistic collocational environment shapes its associative profile. Regression modelling demonstrates that the predictability of this textual distribution is a significant predictor of variance in the cue’s response profile. Overall, however, the amount of variance explained is small. A subsequent qualitative examination of distributional and associative profiles suggests several semantically based constraints to response generation.