Association-Interpretation: A research technique in cultural and cognitive linguistics

There has been growing interest in the study of the human conceptual system across several disciplines and sub-disciplines in the last two decades. Cognitive scientists have been involved in modeling the architecture of the human conceptual system. For instance, a fairly recent paradigm in cognitive science called "connectionism" models the human conceptual system as a network composed of a large number of units joined together in a pattern of connections (Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986). Cognitive linguists, on the other hand, have been investigating the contents of the human conceptual system and how they are reflected in language (Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Langacker, 1987, 1991, 2000).