Understanding the semantic distance in adolescent’s bilinguals. (Published)
The words in the lexicon are assumed to be arranged in networks or semantic fields. This view is the basis for priming experiments. The priming experiments believe that when the target word is preceded by a semantically related word, the word is activated earlier when compared to conditions where the word occurs in isolation or it is preceded by a semantically unrelated word. This view is universally related but the magnitude of semantic relationship may not be the same for all kinds of words. A word in the lexicon can be related to other words by four types of relationships namely super ordinate, derivative, category coordinate and derivative. The aim of the study was to study the semantic organisation in adolescent, young and older adults. A total of 200 participants were considered for the study. A paper-pencil test was administered on these participants, where they were asked to encircle the word which would go well with the target word. The findings of the study showed that the semantic organisation did not vary much between the three groups. Associative semantic ordinate was proximally related to the target word, while super ordinates were distally related to the target word.
Citation: Abdullah S A A F Alfarhan , Yousef H S M M Alshammari and Fares HA Awadh (2022) Understanding the semantic distance in adolescent’s bilinguals. British Journal of Education, Vol.10., Issue 9, pp. 51-58,
Keywords: Distance, adolescent’s bilinguals, fields, semantic