Die Repräsentation von Fachsprache im mentalen Lexikon. Empirische Ergebnisse zur Wortassoziation

Abstract

The main purpose of the paper is to show how the psycholinguistic method of word association analysis can provide new insights into the mental representation of languages for
specific purposes. Languages for specific purposes and their use have been thoroughly analysed in the past decades. Despite the extensive research carried out in the field, just a few papers analyse the cognitive representation of these languages. The present paper shows that some characteristics of the cognitive representation of these languages can be obtained on the basis of word association tests. Tests have been carried out in Hungarian for two languages for specific purposes: Economy and Sports. In the investigation of the language of Economy we collected associations with a research webpage specially created for collecting word association data from internet users. The associations of 593 subjects are analysed for 19 stimuli. For the language of Sports 100 people gave associations to 100 stimuli, of which 20 are examined in the paper. The analyses of the associations show that the cognitive organization depends not only on education level in a specialised field: it seems that (at least up to a certain level) age also plays an important role in the cognitive organization structure of specialised languages. The final part of the paper shows how a better understanding of the cognitive representation of languages for specific purposes can help to improve selected aspects of specialised communication.