A study of inter- and intralingual association in English and German,’ Language Learning 22: 51–63

Free associations and eight types of restricted associations were obtained to 40 nouns from 24 American students of German under four conditions: EE, GG, EG and GE (where English (E) and German (G) are stimulus and response languages, respec-tively). Because many interlingual responses were translations or partially identical with the stimuli their interlingual varia-bility w a s lower than that of the intralingual free associations. Interlingual responses were primarily, paradigmatic whereas intralingual responses were syntagmatic. The variabilities of all interlingual and of some intralingual restricted associations were larger than those of free associations. The overlap between dif-ferent types of restricted associations was markedly higher for the second than for the first language. In the in$‘rpretations, classes of possible responses were compared with subjective” response preferences and sets