One of the fundamental questions in the field of language acquisition is a learnability problem, which considers how learners acquire certain aspects of language which are not directly provided in the input or whose referents are not readily observable. This dissertation investigates Japanese children's acquisition of various linguistic phenomena,…

Subject relative clauses (RCs) have been shown to be acquired earlier, comprehended more accurately, and produced more easily than object RCs by children. While this subject preference is often claimed to be a universal tendency, it has largely been investigated piecemeal and with low-powered experiments. To address these issues, this…

The current study investigates preschool-age children's comprehension of scrambled sentences in Japanese. While scrambling has been known to be challenging for children, biasing them to exhibit non-adult-like interpretations (e.g., Hayashibe in "Descr Appl Linguist" 8:1-18, 1975; Sano in "Descr Appl Linguist" 10:213-233, 1977;…

Much work on child sentence processing has demonstrated that children are able to use various linguistic cues to incrementally resolve temporary syntactic ambiguities, but they fail to use syntactic or interpretability cues that arrive later in the sentence. The present study explores whether children incrementally resolve filler-gap dependencies,…

The interpretation of floating quantifiers in Japanese requires knowledge of hierarchical phrase structure. However, the input to children is insufficient or even misleading, as our analysis indicates. This presents an intriguing question on learnability: do children interpret floating quantifiers based on a structure-dependent rule which is not…

Recent studies on the acquisition of semantics have argued that knowledge of the universal quantifier is adult-like throughout development. However, there are domains where children still exhibit non-adult-like universal quantification, and arguments for the early mastery of relevant semantic knowledge do not explain what causes such…

A study of second language acquisition focuses on the transition from formulaic to creative speech patterns. Subjects were two native Japanese-speaking children, aged 4 and 8, learning English as a Second Language in New York, observed over a period of 2 years. The nature of formulaic speech is discussed, drawing from research on such speech and…

Examined whether the characteristics in perception of speech sounds found in preverbal hearing infants might extend to the perception of signed language in infants with congenital deafness. Seventeen Japanese mother-infant dyads participated in the study. Found that infants with deafness showed greater attentional and affective responsiveness to…

A study evaluated how well autistic and non-autistic Japanese primary children (N=35) were able to describe the events in a five-frame cartoon. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive ability and linguistic skills. Discussion focuses on how to help autistic individuals improve their language once they have acquired its rudiments. (DJD)

Study of children who go through a "silent period" early in the course of second language development found that most of the children engaged in extensive private speech, including: repetition of others' utterances; recall and practice; creation of new linguistic forms; paradigmatic substitution; and rehearsal for overt social…

A cross-linguistic comparison of syntax acquisition patterns examined preferential subject omission in the naturally-occurring speech of three Japanese toddlers from the Tokyo area and compared the findings to data on English acquisition. Results indicate that acquisition patterns of Japanese do not mirror those of English with regard to this…

Analysis of data from the first six months of acquisition of English as a second language by a Japanese five-year-old illustrated the role of modular "chunking" and coupling in the second language acquisition process, apparent in the child's pre-copula and copula referential utterances. (Author/CB)

The proceedings include the following papers: "Why We Study Child Language"; "Children's Use of Information in Word Learning"; "An Examination of the Initial Mapping of Verb Meanings"; "Evidence for the VP Constituent from Child Korean"; "The Role of Stress, Position, and Intonation in the…

Papers on child language development include: "Sentence Frame Effects on Children's Category Judgments" (Alison K. Adams); "Color Similarity in Children's Classifications and Extension of Object Labels" (Dare Baldwin); "Situational Properties of Early Verb Meaning" (Pol Cuvelier); "Similarity, Specificity, and…

Papers presented at a 1977 symposium on language acquisition held at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee are included. Contents are as follows: "Assumptions, Methods and Goals in Language Acquisition Research" (Sheldon); "The Mother as LAD: Interaction between Order and Frequency of Parental Input and Child Production"…