About
This data was collected in 2017 by Tess Fitzpatrick and Tesni Galvin, who was supported by the Swansea University Paid Internship scheme. The participants were bilingual Welsh/English speakers and completed two sets of single word responses to 100 cues, one set in Welsh and one set in English. The cues were chosen from the Academic word list Sublists 1-41. The two lists were matched for word class and frequency, and one list was translated into Welsh.
The participants were all expert/L1 users of English. They self-identified their status as L1 or L2 users of Welsh, and L2 users declared their proficiency level using CEFR level descriptors:
- L1 Welsh: n=36
- L2 Welsh: n=36, of whom:
- A1/A2: n=3
- B1/B2: n=11
- C1/C2: n=22
(The above count does not include 2 participants who did not provide information about their Welsh language status or proficiency, and 11 participants with ≥30 blank responses (out of 100) in either the English or the Welsh data – these were excluded from the dataset).
This Welsh-English data has been analysed to address questions including the following:
- Is association behaviour different in English and in Welsh?
- Are individual bilinguals’ association patterns consistent across their languages?
- Is there more across-language consistency in association patterns in L1 participants than in L2 participants?
1Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL quarterly, 34(2), 213-238
Outputs related to this data include:
- Morris, S., Fitzpatrick, T. and Mills, T. (2024, September 5-7). An analysis of word association behaviour in Welsh [poster presentation]. BAAL conference 2024, University of Essex. (see Resources > talks and posters)
- Morris, S., Fitzpatrick, T. and Mills, T. (in preparation). Word association behaviour in a minoritised language.
Please cite the information and data on this page as: Fitzpatrick, T., Mills, T., and Morris, S. (2025). Finding, Sharing and Losing Words: Understanding the Mental Lexicon [Fitzpatrick, T. and Galvin, T. Bilingual Cymraeg-English word associations]. Swansea University. https://mental-lexicon.swansea.ac.uk/.
Data
The dataset below contains all of the raw data collected, in English and Welsh, as well as norms lists for each language.
By downloading the file below, you agree to use this dataset under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.
| File | Link |
| Welsh-English WA Dataset | Download.xlsx |
Acknowledgments
This data was collected by undergrad student Tesni Galvin on behalf of and supervised by Tess Fitzpatrick, funded by a SPIN (Swansea Paid Internship scheme) award.