The
Acquisition
of
Japanese

The CLESS project is investigating children's acquisition of Japanese using spontaneous production data collected from children in Japan. In our work thus far we have concentrated on children's knowledge of morphological compounding, and their knowledge of complex predicates such as resultatives, causatives, and dative constructions. In addition, we are examining the acquisition of case particles, scrambling, and quantification.

The Japanese-learning children in our study are known as

Kan and Mami

Our publications on Japanese include the following:

Isobe, Miwa and Koji Sugisaki (2001) Acquisition of resultatives in Japanese and the theory of Compounding Parameter. In Y. Otsu and Y. Furukawa (eds.) Proceedings of TCP 2000. Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo.

Matsuoka, Kazumi (1998) The Acquisition of Japanese Case Particles and the Theory of Case Checking. Doctoral dissertation, University of Connecticut, Storrs.

Matsuoka, Kazumi (1999) Nominative objects and lack of multiple feature-checking in child Japanese. In E. van Gelderen and V. Samiian (eds.) Proceedings of the Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL 98), Volume 10. Department of Linguistics, California State University, Fresno

Matsuoka, Kaumi (2001) The acquisition of the Japanese particle _ni_. In Mineharu Nakayama (ed.) Issues in East Asian Language Acquisition. Tokyo: Kuroshio Shuppan.

Miyoshi, Nobuhiro (1999) Compounds and complex predicates: Japanese evidence for a "global" parameter. In A. Greenhill, H. Littlefield, and C. Tano (eds.) Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Volume 2, 453-461. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Sugisaki, Koji and Miwa Isobe (2001) Resultatives result from the Compounding Parameter: On the acquisitional correlation between resultatives and N-N compounds in Japanese. In Proceedings of WCCFL 19. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Sugisaki, Koji and Miwa Isobe (in press) What can child Japanese tell us about the syntax of scrambling? In Proceedings of WCCFL 20. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Sugisaki, Koji and Miwa Isobe (in press) Some asymmetries in child Japanese and their theoretical implications. In Proceedings of TCP 2001. Tokyo: Hituzi Shobo.





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