Masatoshi Sugiura

Collocational Knowledge of L2 Learners of English: A Case Study of Japanese Learners

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the collocational knowledge of L2 learners. Based on a literature review of the features of L1 collocational knowledge and its acquisition, it is clear that native speakers know a lot of collocational expressions, and nativelike word selection and fluency depend heavily on collocational knowledge. Learners’ lack of collocational knowledge has been pointed out in previous studies using learner corpora. This study used a corpus of learner data with paraphrases by a native speaker. This parallel corpus made it possible to compare differences between usage by learners and native speakers on a word-by-word basis. As a result of an experiment extracting fixed expressions using the program ngram, the amount of learners’ collocational knowledge was proven to be smaller than the native speaker’s. Besides, the tendency that learners use limited expressions often has been confirmed as well as the tendency that learners overuse sentence initial conjunctions. The results suggest that these differences concerning collocational knowledge may explain the unnaturalness of language learners’ sentence production.

Developmental Sentence Scoring for Japanese

This article reports on the development and use of the Developmental Sentence Scoring for Japanese (DSSJ), a new morpho-syntactical measure for Japanese constructed after the model of Lee’s English Developmental Sentence Scoring model. Using this measure, the authors calculated DSSJ scores for 84 children divided into six age groups between 2;8 and 5;2 on the basis of 100-sentence samples collected from free-play child–adult conversations. The analysis showed a high correlation of the DSSJ overall score with the Mean Length of Utterance. The analysis of the DSSJ sub-area scores revealed large variations between these sub-area scores for children with similar overall DSSJ scores. When investigating the high-scoring children (over 1 SD over group average), most children scored high in three to five sub-areas, but the combination of scores for these sub-areas varied from child to child. It is concluded that DSSJ is a valuable tool especially for language acquisition research. The overall DSSJ score reliably reflects the overall morpho-syntactic development of Japanese children, and the sub-area scores provide specific information on individual acquisition patterns.