Paper short abstract:

In this paper, we present an interdisciplinary project dedicated to the creation of a bilingual English Japanese language learning environment. The project incorporates the expertise of specialists in app development, natural language processing, linguistics, digital humanities and psychology.

Paper long abstract:

In psychology and linguistics, the mental lexicon is defined as information on the meaning, syntactic features, pronunciation, and sociolinguistic knowledge humans have about words. Previous research (De Deyne, Verheyen, and Storms 2016) suggests that word associations are an effective tool to measure the mental lexicon, in a way that complements text-corpus based resources. The ability to collect word associations at a large scale provides new ways to measure meaning in the mental lexicon and study how language shapes and is shaped by our mental representations. Such topics as demographic-dependent differences in language use (Garimella, Banea, and Mihalcea 2017), lexical centrality, and semantic similarity (De Deyne et al. 2019) are investigated with word associations as the main material for the studies.

In this paper, we present an interdisciplinary project dedicated to the creation of a bilingual English Japanese language learning environment based on the Small World of Words project, a large-scale crowd-sourced word association project in 17 languages that aims to measure common sense word meaning. The project is conducted as a collaboration between researchers and developers at the University of Tokyo, Japan, and the University of Melbourne, Australia. It incorporates the skill and expertise of specialists in app development, natural language processing, linguistics, digital humanities and psychology.

The learning environment is currently under development, a prototype beta version was launched in 2022. The environment aims to provide research-driven, clear, and concise visualizations to learn about what meaning is shared and what is unique in English and Japanese. It uses word association data from the Small Word of Words project in Japanese and English. It highlights what associations are common across speakers of these languages and which are language-specific by aligning word association networks in these languages. We expect this project to be of interest to language teachers and learners as well as researchers interested in comparative analyses of mental lexicon across languages. In future releases, new words will be added and the project will be extended to other languages covered as a part of the Small Word of Words project.