The Relationship between the Use of Noun-Verb Collocations by Japanese Language Learners and Their Japanese Proficiency

An Analysis of YNU Written Language Corpus

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to clarify the relationship between the use of noun-verb collocations by Japanese language learners and their Japanese proficiency. Data for the study were obtained from compositions written by Japanese language learners who are native speakers of Chinese or Korean, generally with an advanced level of Japanese. The learners in the YNU written language corpus are divided into low-level, mid-level, and high-level groups. The data from the three groups revealed that: 1) the number of well-formed collocations increases with the improvement of the learners' Japanese proficiency, and has a significant positive correlation with their Japanese proficiency; 2) the mid-level group produced significantly more deviant collocations than the other two groups, whereas the high-level group produced significantly fewer deviant collocations. It is shown that in the acquisition of Japanese noun-verb collocations, at first the errors temporarily increase, and then decrease with further improvement in the learners' Japanese proficiency.