Interference, Homonymy and Word Associations
Interference, Homonymy and Word Associations

Summary/Abstract: Some discrepancies between articulation of sounds in Bulgarian and in English might be the reason for Bulgarian learners of English to mishear an English word. The failure to identify the correct phoneme leads to wrong interpretations of what is being said and in case of a type of a free association test due to homonymy the response words go in completely different directions. Interference is at the core of the problem and it gives a clue about the reason for some response words occurrences in Word association tests (WAT). The experiment in the paper relies on data collection from testing students on their associations with 20 stimuli out of context. The focus is only on those stimulus words in which (near) homonymy is noticed. The suggested analysis is qualitative as the present paper interprets some particular cases from the experiment results rather than the overall situation in terms of quantity. Homonymy is considered in both Bulgarian and English languages as an act of delving a bit deeper into the reasons leading to confusion. The article addresses the relationship between mother tongue interference and artificial homonymy as a result of a word association test. Also, it relies on some findings in dictionaries of homonyms issued at different periods in time.

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