2018 Alternates 6498

2018 Alternates | Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Poster Session II, Metcalf Small | 3:15pm

Children’s Acquisition of Clefts Revisited: New Evidence from Child Japanese
A. Ohba, T. Sano, K. Yamakoshi

Introduction: It has recently been reported that children acquiring English and Japanese comprehend clefts well when clefts are presented with felicitous contexts ([1],[2],[3]). However, these experiments leave open the possibility that the children used strategies other than knowledge of clefts. We examined Japanese children’s knowledge of clefts with the three-animal condition in such a way as to exclude these strategies. Our experiment shows that, although the children’s performance was degraded on subject clefts (SCs), the children were quite successful at comprehending object clefts (OCs).

Previous Studies: The previous studies ([1],[2],[3]) have shown that children acquiring English and Japanese comprehend clefts as adults do when felicitous contexts are provided ((1)&(2)).

However, there remains the possibility that the children in the studies used some strategies. In Japanese, children can answer correctly only after hearing the first NP of a cleft because nominative-case-marked NPs in OCs ((2c)) and accusative-case-marked NPs in SCs ((1c)) represent agents and patients. In English, children can produce correct answers only by hearing the first part of the cleft, such as ‘It is a dog’, since animals hidden in felicitous contexts match the focus of clefts((1a)&(2a), English translations of (1c)&(2c)).

In order to make these strategies unavailable, we gave children pictures with three animals(the three-animal condition), in which children produce correct answers only if they have knowledge of clefts.

Experiment: We tested 23 Japanese children(4;0–6;7, Mean:5;2) using the Truth Value Judgment Task([4]). The first(P1) and second pictures(P2) were presented with an oral context and a recorded test sentence. In P1, the animal that would be included in the presupposition of a cleft is revealed and the other two animals that are possible candidates for the focus are hidden by gray squares. We also tested declaratives to make sure that the three-animal condition itself was not difficult for the children.

Results and Discussion: As shown in Table 1, the children performed well on declaratives(97.3%(179/184)) and had no difficulty with the three-animal condition. Next, the 4-to-6-year-olds correctly comprehended the OCs 93.5%(86/92) of the time. Since our experiment excluded possible strategies, this indicates that the children already have an adult-like grammar of OCs.

Furthermore, we found subject-object asymmetry(62.0% vs. 93.5%). We consider the lower correct response rate of SCs to be due to the word order(OVS), which apparently differs from the canonical SOV. Our results are in line with [2], which proposed that English-speaking children’s difficulty with OCs was caused by a different word order(OSV) from canonical SVO. Moreover, our results are consistent with several previous studies which reported that Japanese children tend to misinterpret sentence-initial accusative-case-marked NPs as agents([5] for scrambling and [6] for relative clauses).

To conclude, our experiment shows that while Japanese 4-to-6-year-olds have already acquired knowledge of OCs, their performance with SCs was degraded, probably because of the word order of SCs(i.e. OVS). Since we excluded possible strategies by using the three-animal condition, we seem to have succeeded in examining the Japanese children’s knowledge of clefts precisely, and we have shown that children have knowledge of OCs.

References

[1] Aravind, A., N. Freedman, M. Hackl and K. Wexler. 2016. Subject-Object Asymmetries in the Acquisition of Clefts. Proceedings of the 40th BUCLD, 1-17. [2] Aravind, A., M. Hackl and K. Wexler. 2017. Syntactic and Pragmatic Factors in Children’s Comprehension of Cleft Constructions. Language Acquisition. [3] Ohba, A.and K. Yamakoshi. 2017. The Acquisition of Subject and Object Clefts in Child Japanese. Handout presented at the 13th WAFL. [4] Crain, S. and R. Thornton. 1998. Investigations in Universal Grammar, MIT Press. [5] Otsu, Y. 1994. Early Acquisition of Scrambling in Japanese. Language Acquisition Studies in Generative Grammar, John Benjamins, 258-264. [6] Suzuki, T. 2011. A Case-Marking Cue for Filler–Gap Dependencies in Children’s Relative Clauses in Japanese. Journal of Child Language, 38: 5, 1084-1095.