A study of relations between associative structure and morphological structure of Hungarian words

structure of Hungarian words Dániel Czégel Budapest University of Technology and Economics czegel [email protected] Zsolt Lengyel Pannon University, Veszprém Csaba Pléh Central European University, Budapest [email protected] The paper mainly aims to reanalyze data with the presently available corpus linguistics tools from a relatively large scale paper-and-pencil based Hungarian verbal association dictionary with regard to two aspects. i) The mental lexicon issue. How are associative overlaps representing structural relations in the mental lexicon? ii) The systemic variability of the associative fields mobilized by the stimulus words: how variable the responses are, and how these associative entropies are related to morphological entropies of the same words. 1 Methods and materials For the associative corpora, two dictionaries of Lengyel [3] were used. They are based on the responses of 2000 students between 10 − 14 and 18 − 24 to about 200 stimulus words. Digitized responses from this dictionary were related to the frequency distribution of 800 million web-based Hungarian words from the MOKK corpus [2]. 2 Results 2.1 Associative overlaps and lexical fields Based on the associative overlap measure introduced by Deese [1], a multidimensional scaling method was used to obtain associative fields depicting the pairwise associative distance of stimulus words in a two-dimensional figure. The results indicate that young adults have a more dense structure, their associative clusters are more tight compared to those of children of age 10-14, as illustrated in figure (1) and (2) and shown quantitatively in figure (3) and (4). window give bed