Open Access“That Sounds About Right”—Lexical Bundle Naturalness Intuitions in Japanese Learners of English
Author(s) -
Julian Northbrook,
AUTHOR_ID,
Kathy Conklin,
AUTHOR_ID
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
vocabulary learning and instruction
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2187-2759
pISSN - 2187-2767
DOI - 10.7820/vli.v10.1.northbrook.conklin
Subject(s) - naturalness , linguistics , psychology , american english , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics
The current study examines the perceived naturalness of lexical bundles learned from early-stage teaching materials in Japanese learners of English. Naturalness ratings of 24 native English speakers and 23 non-native speakers with Japanese as their first language were compared in relation to corpus derived frequencies from the British National Cor- pus (BNC) and a corpus of Japanese secondary-school English textbooks—the “Junior High School English Textbook Corpus” (JHSETC, Northbrook & Conklin, 2018). The rating scores of both groups were significantly predicted by lexical bundle frequency. However, the groups were sensitive to different metrics; the performance of native speakers was best predicted by the BNC, and that of the Japanese speakers by the JHSETC. This is taken as evidence that learner intuitions are affected by the input they receive from teaching materials, and that these intuitions may stay with learners long term.