Study On Verb Restricted Association Of Chinese Native Speakers And Non-native Speakers

Since words are part and parcel of verbal communication and Studying vocabulary and practicing words in communication last a lifetime for a language learner and therefore vocabulary acquisition weights substantially in second language acquisition. Knowledge of words ranges from static form(i.e. pronunciation, spelling) and meaning, to syntactic feature(semantic feature, function), collocation, frequency, words relationship, pragmatic condition, etc. The establishment of association between words and a good command of company of one word and another are the important components.This paper applies a restricted word association test. It selects 36 action verbs and 36 psychological verbs and categorizes them into high and low according to the frequency, testing the Chinese native speakers and Chinese as second language learners on confined-collocation response. According to the statistical analysis of the test results, this paper draws the conclusions as follows:(1) The response strength and the response commonality represent the response concentration degree and consistency of the subject, which are usually consistent; in other words, the stimulus with high response strength is also found with a great response commonality. The response heterogeneity reflects the dispersion degree of response distribution, that is, the response difference, thus usually opposite to the response strength and commonality. This view is also proved from the test.(2) For Chinese native speakers, there is no significant difference of the response strength and commonality of action verbs and psychological verbs in verb-objective, verb-complement and adverbial-core collocations. The response heterogeneity of psychological verbs is higher than that of action verbs; and there is no marked difference in the number of response of various collocations between high and low frequency words.(3) For non-native speakers, the degrees of response strength and commonality from high to low are: middle-level > high level, adverbial-core > verb-complement> verb-objective(the last two are of little difference), low frequency words> high frequency words.While the response heterogeneity reflected the very opposite.(4) The Chinese proficiency of non-native speakers has certain connections with word association: there is a negative correlation between Chinese proficiency level and response strength and commonality. As the learners' Chinese proficiency is improving, the response strength and commonality are lower and closer to that of Chinese native speakers. However, this development does not appear linear since the learners with high Chinese proficiency experience retrogress in response heterogeneity(higher than that of Chinese native speakers).Therefore this paper concludes that the second language learners' proficiency level of the target language bears certain connections with word association. As the proficiency level increases, the word association response of second language learners is gradually closer to that of native speakers, with fluctuation and retrogression in this process, however.