This research conducted a word association for the purpose of examining the typical word associations of Japanese English learners. An experiment was conducted by means of word association tasks with concrete noun target words. We found that language learners associate certain words more frequently than others and that the types of these associations were different from those of native speakers. The coefficient correlation between the difficulty levels of the associated words and their frequency of occurrence was relatively low, and some of the associations were based on the learners\u27 cultural or daily life experiences. The phenomena observed in this study must be examined further both by co1lecting data for a larger rumber of target words and by using learners of differing backgrounds. The subject of this study were Japanese university freshmen majoring in technology, and it is possible that the subjects\u27learning stage and social and cultural backgrounds affect the results of association task. Word association research with a limited number of key words may, however, be useful in finding some portions of language learners\u27 associations, some of which could suggest cue words for other learners\u27 improved comprehension. Some of the frequent associations by learners who know the meaning of words could become effective cues for learners who do not know the meaning of the target word.
