Learners of Japanese as a second language (JSL) find it difficult to learn various sentence patterns. To assist JSL learners with their study of Japanese sentence patterns (JSPs), this paper constructs a human-machine collaborative framework that combines artificial intelligence (AI) techniques with the users' active participation for Japanese…

The goal of this paper is to tease apart two approaches to the source of children's consistent scope assignment in negative sentences containing logical connectives: the Semantic Subset Principle and the Semantic Subset Maxim. Previous developmental work has observed that four- to six-year-old children across languages have difficulty with…

In successful communication, it is critical to have the ability to identify what a speaker is referring to from previously mentioned information. This ability requires the identification of the topic initially introduced by lexical forms and its continuity in discourse expressed by anaphora such as null and pronominal forms in the subsequent…

Languages differ in how they encode causal events, placing greater or lesser emphasis on the agent or patient of the action. Little is known about how these preferences emerge and the relative influence of cognitive biases and language-specific input at different stages in development. In these studies, we investigated the emergence of sentence…

In an experiment conducted with 31 three-, four- and five-year-old Japanese children evidence was found for self-created definitions of the direct and indirect objects of verbs. Linguistic rules undergoing change during the course of the experiment were also observed. The results can be understood as showing that children are guided in their…

Investigates the functional nature of the communication process observed in interactions of English-speaking and Japanese-speaking children from the two-word stage onward, with special attention to the given/new contract and pragmatic factors. (Author/AM)

A study of the acquisition of Japanese sentence-final gender particles in six two year olds, as evidenced in conversations between the children and their mothers, found that the children were sensitive to the gender differences encoded in the particles and strongly sensitive to the social information provided by their parents. (10 references) (MSE)

Explores how children learn the range of aspect inflection to which a verb is amenable. Analyses focus on the children's mastery of Aktionsart specific intersentential patterns. Three conclusions are given based on the study's results. (21 references) (GLR)

Although intonation has been said to be one of the first meaningful units of language that a child acquires, it is difficult to say just what this really means. How does the child learn to distinguish the various grammatical meanings that an intonation can have? It was hypothesized that the child first acquires question and request forms on the…

A competition model experiment is reported that investigated the sentence-processing strategies of English-speaking learners of Japanese and Japanese-speaking learners of English. Results indicated a correlation between learners' proficiency in Japanese and case-marker dependency in Japanese strings. (Contains 23 references.) (Author/LB)

A study investigated Japanese children's acquisition of the syntactical subcategorization of action verbs. Aspects of caregiver language that provide children with information about the characteristics of an action verb are detailed, and the utterances of four Japanese toddlers are analyzed for their usage characteristics. Caregiver sentences are…

Tests the prediction that children acquiring left-branching languages will exhibit a preference for backward patterns of anaphora by presenting data from Japanese and Korean which show the prediction to be false. Findings support the view that any directionality preference for anaphora is the same for all languages. (Author/SED)

The frequency with which a child's parents use a given linguistic form has been considered influential in language development. This hypothesis has been challenged, however, notably by Ervin (1964) and Brown (1973). The frequency hypothesis makes the assumptions that: (1) children are not selective in what they attend to, (2) they listen to most…