Gender Difference in the Free Association for "Cute" and "Kawaii"

In Japan, “Kawaii” is frequently used in various situations mainly by young female. Corresponding English word “Cute” that is pronounced as “Kyuuto” is also used in daily conversation. Our study compared the denotation of both words by applying the free association method, thus clarified the semantic commonality and the difference. The result of survey using 60 informants revealed that the stimulus word Kawaii produced more number of associations than Cute. And our further analysis revealed that Japanese people don’t have opportunities to use the English word Cute in their everyday life, thus they use it as a foreign origin word, and the word Cute contained the image of something of Western/foreign culture. In other words, the pragmatic (cultural) context might have influenced the semantics of the word through the free association that listed up the denotation.