Investigating L2 Learners and Native Speakers’ Intuition of Word Frequency

The study attempted to examine the usefulness of non-native learners’(NNS) subjective frequency estimates as a measure of part of second language proficiency. Participants consisted of 106 Korean university students (NNS) and 27 English native speakers (NS). Each group received the lists of 27 sets of the paired words which consisted of synonymous words on the basis of the speech part (noun, verb, adjectives) and degree of frequency (1000, 2000, 3000 levels) and were asked to rank the frequency of the paired words. The results suggested that the subjective estimates were valid on the ground that both NNS and NS are able to discern more frequent words. However, the result of one-way ANOVA revealed that NS performance of subjective frequency judgement was consistently better than that of NNS with regard to both speech parts and degree of frequency. Correlational analyses and ANOVA results indicated that L2 learners’ lexical proficiency level was not closely related with subjective word frequency test. Limitation and implications of the study were further discussed.