Abstract
This study investigates the development of Japanese collocation knowledge in learners of Japanese. A collocation production survey consisting of 70 basic Japanese nouns was administered to 67 Chinese learners (CN) and 69 native Japanese speakers (JN). Focusing on modification collocations, the results indicated a large difference in the numbers of correctly-produced collocations by the two groups: 2,234 collocations for JNs and 1,656 collocations for CNs. Collocations errors (357) produced by the CNs were classified according to seven types, with semantic collocations errors representing 42% of the total. There were also 84 syntactic errors involving na-adjectives relating to word class and 44 involving i-adjectives relating to form restrictions.
