2016 Volume 165 Pages 73-88
This paper proposes a way to select basic vocabulary for onomatopoeia in spoken Japanese, aiming to develop teaching materials for onomatopoeia based on the selected vocabulary. The procedure of selecting the basic vocabulary consists of three steps. First, I collected 273 onomatopoeia words from the two spoken Japanese corpuses with reference to four onomatopoeia dictionaries. However, the appearance frequency of each word was so biased that it was difficult to rank the words. Second, I conducted a questionnaire survey on how familiar the collected words were and received answers from 458 participants' (218 male and 240 female). Third, I applied a principal component analysis on the frequency and familiarity data, and ranked the 273 onomatopoeia words based on the result. Finally, 252 onomatopoeia words were selected as the basic vocabulary for teaching materials, excluding the 21 lowest scoring words.
