The Effectiveness of the Word Association Test and the Pathfinder in Measuring Lexical Learning of English as a Foreign Language
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.200110537Keywords:
Word Association Test, Pathfinder, English, foreign languge, learningAbstract
In the present paper, the aim is to find out, using the Pretest-Posttest design, whether the Word Association Test (WAT) and Pathfinder methods (Schvaneveldt et al. 1985; Schvaneveldt 1990) are able to measure lexical knowledge of English as a foreign language. Two different types of tasks were proposed. In one task subjects had to write down semantically related terms. In the other, subjects had to make a judgement about the relationship between pairs of words. The first test was evaluated with a scoring system; the second with the Pathfinder algorithm. The results obtained confirm that both methods can be used in the assessment of lexical knowledge.
Downloads
References
AKMAN, Varol. 1997. “Context as a Social Construct”. En Buvac, Sasa y Lucja Iwanska. (eds.). AAAI-97 Fall Symposium on Context in Knowledge Representation and Natural Language. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The AAAI Press: 1-6.
BONEAU, C. Allan. 1990. “Psychological Literacy: A First Approximation”. American Psychologist 45: 891-900.
CAPLAN, David y Gloria WATERS. 1998 (en prensa). "Verbal Working Memory and Sentence Comprehension”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
COOKE, Nancy J. 1992. “Predicting Judgment Time from Measures of Psychological Proximity”. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 18 (3): 640-653.
COOKE, Nancy M., Francis T. DURSO y Roger W. SCHVANEVELDT. 1986. “Recall and Measures of Memory Organization”. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 12 (4): 538-549.
EDELMAN, Shimon y Nathan INTRATOR. 1997 (Preprint). “Learning as a Extraction of Low-Dimensional Representations”. Mechanisms of Perceptual Learning.
GOLDSMITH, Timothy E., Peder J. JOHNSON y William H. ACTON. 1991. “Assessing Structural Knowledge”. Journal of Educational Psychology 83 (1): 88-96.
GONZALVO, P, Juan José CAÑAS y Mª Teresa BAJO. 1994. “Structural Representations in Knowledge Acquisition”. Journal of Educational Psychology 86 (4): 601-616.
JOHNSON, Peder J., Timothy E. GOLDSMITH y Kathleen W. TEAGUE. 1995. “Similarity, Structure,and Knowledge: A Representional Approach to Assessment”. En Nichols, Paul D. Susan F. Chipman y Robert L. Brennan. (eds.). Cognitively Diagnostic Assessment. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum: 221-249.
KIRSCH, Irvin y Guy SAPIRSTEIN. "Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo: A Meta-Analysis of Antidepressant Medication”. Prevention & Treatment (1), Article 0002a. 1998. .
MAZUR, Allan y Joel MICHALEK. 1998 (en prensa). “Marriage, Divorce and Male Testosterone”. Social Forces.
MILLER, George A. 1956. “The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information”. The Psychological Review 63: 81-97.
PITARQUE, Alfonso y Juan Carlos RUIZ. 1997. “Representación del conocimiento estructural tras el entrenamiento en esquemas procedimentales”. Psicológica 18: 11-21.
SÁNCHEZ, Mª Jesús. 1999. “El conocimiento léxico y su aprendizaje en el inglés como lengua extranjera: aplicación del Pathfinder como método de análisis”. Universidad de Salamanca, Tesis doctoral sin publicar.
SCHVANEVELDT, Roger W. (ed.). 1990. Pathfinder Associative Networks: Studies in Knowledge Organization. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
SCHVANEVELDT, Roger, W., Francis T. DURSO, Timothy E. GOLDSMITH, Timothy J. BREEN, Nancy M. COOKE, Richard G. TUCKER y Joseph C. DE MAIO. 1985. “Measuring the Structure of Expertise”. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 23: 699-728.
VERPLANCK, Werplanck S. 1992. “A Brief Introduction to the Word Associate Test”. The Analysis of Verbal Behavior 10: 97-123.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2001 María Jesús Sánchez
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.