Word Association and Its Function at the Constituent Understanding on the Language Learning

Abstract

This paper aimed at describing word association and its function at the constituent understanding on the language learning. Word association is a relation between a word with other words because of the semantic relationship. A word association test appears when there is a stimulus word and someone mentions a response word that comes to mind firstly based on the stimulus word. The response words show someone’s mental lexicon as a result of language acquisition and language learning. Word associations can be used in the process of understanding constituents (linguistic units) with word association tests, they are (1) words, (2) phrases, and (3) sentence patterns. In word constituent learning, word association tests are carried out by asking questions so that the result can show the semantic networks of words that are classified by word type. Phrase constituent learning is also held by asking questions, but response words are included before or after the stimulus word so that these words form a phrase. Meanwhile, sentence constituent learning is held by presenting words that are located as predicate and then asking questions that bring up the subject, object, complement, or additional information that accompany the predicate. With this method, students do not only learn constituents as units that have levels from small (words) to large ones (sentences), but also understand that constituents have a patterned and interconnected system.   Keywords: word associations, constituents, language learning