A corpus study of the Japanese noun linker ‘no’ in Spanish L1 speakers

The current study is a corpus study that investigates Spanish L1 learners of Japanese and their misuse of the possessive marker ‘no’ in speech production. The misuse of ‘no’ has been studied in mainly Chinese, English and Korean L1 speakers of Japanese across different proficiencies (e.g., Koyama, 2006) but not other L1 speakers. The results indicate that there is a developmental trend found where participants produce the most overuse around the intermediate proficiency and decline as they advance, and the number of overuses also vary depending on the target phrase due to the frequency of words and the nature of the tasks of the corpus. There are also chunking that played a role in the overuse of ‘no’.