Abstract
Scholars have often assumed that a trend towards paradigmatic responses in adult word associations is universal.  However, several studies have found that Japanese adults tend more towards syntagmatic responding, both in English and Japanese. In contrast to most Indo-European languages, Korean is grammatically similar to Japanese. Thus in order to explore the possibility of a link between linguistic background and syntagmatic patterning, the present study reports a pilot test of 29 Korean university students tested in Korean. Their response patterns are compared with primary Japanese, US, German and French responses, and found to pattern like Japanese (i.e. syntagmatic) rather than Western (i.e. paradigmatic).  These results imply that the assumption of universality of paradigmatic response patterns does not hold for speakers of these languages, and that the syntagmatic patterning shown by Japanese and Koreans may be related in part to the structural qualities of their native languages.

1.  Introduction.     In word association tests over hundreds of years, native speakers of English and other Indo-European languages have consistently given responses showing a paradigmatic relationship to stimulus words.  In addition, Nigerian (Folarin 1989)2, Navaho (Ervin and Landar 1963) and Chinese (Lin 1996) speakers have been reported to show similar patterning.        Such results seem to support tentative claims such as "there seems to be a great uniformity in people's responses to certain stimulus words” and "people respond in consistent ways, even if the words they respond with are different, in word-association tests” (McCarthy 1990:39), and we find many scholars agreeing to at least the possibility that paradigmatic patterning is a general human trait (see also Lin 1996, Deignan 1996).	On the other hand, Deignan et al (1996:82) state that for (at least some) non-native speakers of English, associated words are often collocational (or syntagmatic) rather than semantic (or paradigmatic).  For example, Soekman (1993) observed that over 40% of the responses of her ESL students (of who over 60% were Japanese or Korean) were what she calls affective (=associations that show a visual image, opinion, emotional response or personal past experience) i.e. syntagmatic3.  Recent studies find that Japanese speakers tend to respond syntagmatically in English, especially with lower level learners (87.3% of classifiable responses in Yoneoka 1987, 69% of all responses in Orita 1999) and lower frequency stimulus words (37% of all responses for high frequency words, but 63.9% for lower frequency words in Wolter 1999). 
When tested in Japanese, the percentages of syntagmatic responses of Japanese speakers tends to be even higher: Yoneoka (1987) cites 95% of classifiable responses and Wolter (1999) 62% of all responses as paradigmatic.4 Furthermore, Yoneoka (2000) finds that this percentage may be significantly influenced by the test administration method: directions requesting content-oriented responses showed 92.4% syntagmatic responses, whereas directions requesting time-oriented responses resulted in only 68.6% of the classifiable responses being syntagmatic. 
	It has been clearly demonstrated, then, that Japanese adult response patterns to word association tests are more syntagmatic than Western ones, and that this response pattern is affected by language of response, choice of stimulus words and test administration methods.5  Next, the natural question to ask is, why?
There are many possible causes for this phenomenon—one can immediately imagine cultural, educational, societal, national character, neurological and linguistic causes, or any combination of these factors.  Teasing these factors apart, however, is no easy matter. Comparison with other national groups that have some similar traits but not others, however, may provide a clue.  
Linguistically, Korean is extremely close to Japanese both in grammar and vocabulary, but (although they certainly exist) I am not aware of word association studies that have been performed on Korean speakers in Korean. Thus, in order to explore the possibility of a link between linguistic background and syntagmatic patterning, a pilot test of 29 Korean university students was performed and results are discussed in this paper.
2.  The Korean study. 
The pilot test presented here was administered orally by a native Korean speaker to 29 Korean university students (13 male, 16 female) and consisted of the same 11 stimulus words used in Yoneoka (2000a) (3 nouns: apple, crow, milk;  4 adjs: rough, sour, high, beautiful;  4 verbs: rip, pull, walk, give). Students wrote down their answers in Korean.
	 
Stimulus word	Korean	Japanese
	French
	German	US 	
(Nouns)						
     apple	Red　(31%)	red	*	*	orange,pie	
     crow	Claws (10%)	black	bird	bird	bird	
     milk	Child (17%)	white	*	*	cow, water	
(Adjectives)						
     rough	Scary (10%)	wave,
violent	smooth	smooth	smooth,
tough	
     sour	Lemon (38%)	lemon	sweet	sweet	sweet,
grapes	
     high	Sky (34%)	building,
mountain	low	low	low	
    beautiful	Flower (34%)	flower	woman	ugly	ugly	
(Verbs)						
     rip	**glass (28%)	paper	*	*	tear,torn	
     pull	Tiring 17%)	rope	*	*	push,tug	
     walk	walk (n.) ,tiring (10%)	foot	*	*	run	
     give	Present (48%)	present	*	*	take	
						
Source	Yoneoka 1996	Yoneoka 1987	Rosenzweig 1961	Rosenzweig 1961	Yoneoka 1987	
  *Data not available.
**The Korean translation of rip also has the meaning of break

Fig. 2.  Most Popular Responses for each Language Group	
The most popular Korean responses are shown in Fig. 2 compared with primary Japanese, US, German and French responses.  The results clearly show that the syntagmatic patterning found in Japanese responses is present in Korean ones as well: adjective descriptors or functional nouns for nouns (crow-scary; milk-child), noun examples for adjectives (sour-lemon; beautiful-flower) and noun objects for verbs (rip-paper/glass; give-present (n.)).  This is in stark contrast to the Western responses, which are almost exclusively paradigmatic; the only three exceptions being one noun-example French response (beautiful-woman) and two US responses that fill out idiomatic phrases (sour-grapes, rip-torn).6  

	Stim word/
resp type	Adj’val
(syntagmatic)	Verbal
(syntagmatic)	Total syntagmatic	Functional
(paradigmatic)	Logical
(paradigmatic)	Total paradigmatic	
KOREAN 								
(N=29)	Noun	43	 3	46	49	 4	53	
	Adj	87	 1	88	 0	11	11	
	Verb	17	76	93	 3	 4	 7	
	Total	49	26.67	75.67	17.33	 6.33	23.33	
JAPANESE 								
(N=30)	Noun	26.67	17.78	44.45	53.33	 2.22	57.55	
	Adj	93.33	  0	93.33	  0	 6.67	 6.67	
	Verb	 2.27	93.18	95.45	  0	 4.55	 4.55	
	Total	41.04	36.57	77.61	17.91	 4.48	22.39	
US								
(N=30)	Noun	 2.44	14.63	17.07	31.71	51.22	83.93	
	Adj	34.15	 2.44	36.59	 4.88	58.54	63.42	
	Verb	 9.52	38.1	47.62	 7.14	45.24	52.38	
	Total	15.32	18.55	33.87	14.52	51.61	66.13	

Fig. 3.  Comparison of percentages of Korean, Japanese and US response types (cf. Yoneoka 1987, 2000a)
	The overall percentages of paradigmatic vs. syntagmatic responding (shown in Fig. 3) reflect the tendencies of the primary responses in the various languages. The percentages of Korean, Japanese and US responses are broken down into four categories: adjectival (A-N, N-A pairs), verbal (V-N, N-V pairs) (=syntagmatic), functional (pairs with image-completing or idiomatic relationship) and logical (same class pairs with classificational relationship).  The former two categories are generally classified as syntagmatic and the latter two as paradigmatic. We see that the Korean and Japanese response patterns are highly similar: they are both primarily syntagmatic (75.67% and 77.55% respectively), as opposed to less than 34% for the US responses. 
 In addition, it is noteworthy that the subtypology of the paradigmatic responses differs between the Westerners and the Easterners:  the latter are much more functional (=17-18%) than logical (=4.48-6.33%), in contrast to the over 51% logical US responses.  It is also interesting to note that the percentages of functional responses do not differ between the groups, and that the vast majority of functional responses for all groups occur with noun stimuli.  

3.  Discussion and Conclusions
The findings from this pilot test indicate that both Japanese and Korean speakers tend to respond syntagmatically, at least in their native languages. This explains the trend for groups of primarily non-Western ESL students to respond syntagmatically in English (as discussed in the introduction), and intimates that the reasons for this may have more to do with L1 transfer than with L2 development, in spite of evidence that the latter induces shifting towards paradigmatic responses in the L2. 
What is it, then, that precludes Japanese and Korean adults from showing as many paradigmatic responses as the majority of the Western world?  Let us consider two possibilities – cultural and linguistic.
	It is true that Korea and Japan show many cultural similarities based both on geographical proximity and centuries of intercultural exchange. Are there then cultural similarities that might produce the similarity in response patterning that we see in this study? In Japan, part of the tendency towards syntagmatic responses could be due to a cultural emphasis on description and emotion and general antipathy to logic.  These values can be found in several Japanese words which defy translation into English; e.g. rikutsuppoi (“too” logical), kojitsukeru (to force an interpretation on something which distorts the true feeling), etc.  
	However, these values do not seem to be a part of the Korean culture.  For example, Japanese rikutsu  (=reason, logic, argument) translates into Korean as tori  (reason, propriety, justice, principle, truth).  The secondary dictionary entries listed here demonstrate both the negative value placed on Japanese rikutsu (especially in the Japanese society, where "argument" destroys "harmony") and the positive value placed on Korean tori.  This particular cultural trait, then, is probably not a factor in the similarities in word association response patterns between these two Eastern languages as opposed to other languages. 
This example was discussed not to deny the role of cultural factors, but rather to demonstrate that such a track may be difficult to define as well as pursue, and may lead to some rather unscientific generalizations unless one is well-versed in both cultures.  Naturally, there are many other cultural factors that could conceivably play a role, but detailed discussion is beyond the scope of the present paper.
	Another promising avenue may be linguistic.  Japanese and Korean are morphologically, syntactically and lexically very close languages.  Especially, both use postpositions (including what are called case particles) after lexical items rather than prepositions before them.  This syntactic difference leads to a tendency to parse in terms of "postpositions" even in English, e.g. "I / want to / go to / Hawaii" rather than "I / want / to go / to Hawaii" (Blair 1996).  This could in turn reflect a tendency to automatically "want" to put a grammatical word after a lexical one, which could account for the predominance of noun-adjective word association responses in Japanese and Korean.  After all, if banana translates into "a banana is… " (i.e. /banana wa/ in Japanese and /banana ??/ in Korean) in the hearer's mind, then kiiro (yellow) is an acceptable response; ringo (apple) is not.
	Based on her findings that (mostly Japanese and Korean) ESL students tend to respond syntagmatically, Soekmen (1993, discussed in the introduction) asserts two pedagogical implications for ESL: (1)  that vocabulary should be taught in connection with an "affective" experience, as this would better "fit" the storage patterns in the mind of the ESL student, and (2) that it is not as necessary to teach synonyms and word forms (=the paradigmatic categories which had the fewest responses) as other paradigmatic relationships.  However, we might as well draw the opposite implication: if students already have predetermined affective associations in their native language (i.e. they have already had experiences such as eating delicious, red apples), teaching them to "think in English like Westerners" would mean more direct teaching of paradigmatic association patterns. 
This dilemma cannot be resolved without careful consideration of the reasons behind the differences in patterning.  In other words, an approach that implicitly assumes that the “affectiveness” of the Japanese/Korean lexical storage system is somehow cognitively linked to cultural, sociological, or educational factors would argue for vocabulary acquisition through the assumedly unchanging association patterning demonstrated in WA tests.  On the other hand, if the cause for the difference in patterning is more linguistic than sociological or cognitive, then there is no reason to tailor vocabulary teaching methods to different cultural groups.  Rather, traditional vocabulary teaching methods based on logical semantic relationships will not only suffice for acquisition, they will also expose EFL students to English thinking patterns.  In addition, it may be that mere exposure to large amounts of input and resultant acquisition of the new language will naturally cause increased production of the new patterns (as has been found to be the case in previous studies). 
Thus with respect to the Japanese/Korean monkey wrench, the search for “why?” is not simply an interesting exercise in cognitive psychology, but one with pedagogical implications for the English language teacher as well.

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