Breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge for L2 learners and native speakers of Japanese

The breadth of vocabulary knowledge (i.e., form-meaning connections) and depth of vocabulary knowledge (i.e., word associations) were assessed for Chinese and Korean learners of Japanese as a second language (SL) (the CSL group and the KSL group, respectively), Chinese and Thai learners of Japanese as a foreign language (the CFL group and the TFL group, respectively), and native speakers (the NS group) of Japanese.Both second language (L2) learners and natives performed better with higher frequency words than with lower frequency words and on nouns than on verbs and adjectives/adverbs for form-meaning connections.Furthermore, L2 learners performed the best on nouns for both paradigmatic and syntagmatic associations, suggesting that they rely more on nouns when processing word co-occurrences and collocations.In contrast, native speakers performed the best on nouns for paradigmatic associations and on adjectives/adverbs for syntagmatic associations, suggesting that their word association networks reflect functional language use and concept representations.In addition, word class knowledge differed among L2 learners for both form-meaning connections and word associations, suggesting the possible influence of first language (L1) background and learning environment.