| Budget Amount *help |
¥9,460,000 (Direct Cost: ¥8,800,000、Indirect Cost: ¥660,000)
Fiscal Year 2007: ¥2,860,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,200,000、Indirect Cost: ¥660,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥1,800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,800,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥4,800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥4,800,000)
|
|---|
| Research Abstract |
The purpose of this research was to analyze the differences in collocational knowledge between EFL learners and native English speakers, utilizing three kinds of data: corpora, reaction time, and near-infrared spectroscopy(NIRS).
In 2005, we designed and compiled a new learner corpus. We collected English essays, with copyright permission, written by both Japanese EFL learners and native English speakers: 200 essays were collected from each group. Based on the essay data, we compiled the Nagoya Interlanguage Corpus of English (NICE). The NICE consists of two subcorpora: NICE-NNS (non-native speaker data) and NICE-NS (native speaker data).
In 2006, we added native English speakers' corrections to the learners' essay data in order to carry out error analysis. In addition, we picked up collocational expressions by means of an n-gram program, and created the list of expressions used for the following experiments.
In 2007, we analyzed the linguistic features of distinctive differences between non-native speaker data (NICE-NNS) and native speaker data (NICE-NS). From the subsequent discriminant analysis, we found distinctive differences. Our reaction time analysis disclosed that the EFL learners did have some collocational knowledge, but that the amount of such knowledge varied among the proficiency levels. Our NIRS experiment revealed that the native speakers used only the linguistic area in the brain to process the collocational expressions, with minimum cognitive processing load. The learners, however, used various areas other than the linguistic area, with no particular, common neural activation patterns.
Our learner's corpus, NICE, is currently open to the public, and available on the Internet. Our final report is also available on the Internet in the form of PDF files.
|
