Gossamer or bindweed?

This paper reports a single-subject study of word associations in English. The work uses an innovative research methodology which makes it possible to examine very large numbers of associations. From this we can make some reasonably reliable estimates about the global and local structure of the association network of the Subject. The data suggests that this network is more dense than some common metaphorical descriptions of lexical networks imply. Some of the implications of this for models of L2 vocabulary development are briefly explored.