Koji Sugisaki

Early Acquisition of Basic Word Order in Japanese

The acquisition of word order has been one of the central issues in the study of child language. One striking finding from the detailed investigation of various child languages is that from the earliest observable stages, children are highly sensitive to the basic word order of their target language. However, the evidence so far comes mainly from the acquisition of rigid word-order languages. In light of this background, this study presents new evidence that such early sensitivity to basic word order can be observed even in the acquisition of Japanese, a free word-order language.

An event-related fNIRS investigation of Japanese word order

Japanese is a free word-order language, and allows both subject–object–verb (SOV) and object–subject–verb (OSV) orders. Our previous study using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) imaging revealed that OSV sentences induce more activation in the left frontal lobe than SOV sentences. The present study develops our previous experiment: (1) by adopting an event-related design, and (2) by using sentences involving the adverb naze ‘why’, which plays a prominent role in recent linguistic studies. The results of our new experiment indicated that the cerebral activation in OwhySV sentences was significantly larger than that in SwhyOV sentences, in the right anterior prefrontal region, which is consistent with the assumption that OwhySV order is derived from SwhyOV order. We speculate that the activation observed in the anterior prefrontal cortex during the processing of the sentences involving ‘why’ might be due to the processing of higher-order function in the cerebral cortex.

The Parameter of Preposition Stranding: A View From Child English

In this squib we examine the time course of childrens acquisition of English to evaluate the basic insights of Kaynes (1981; 1984) proposals on preposition stranding. Kayne argued that the availability of preposition stranding (P-stranding) in English is parametrically linked to the availability of double object datives and the prepositional complementizer (PC) construction. We demonstrate that acquisitional evidence lends support to one component of Kaynes proposal, namely, that Universal Grammar (UG) contains a parameter that makes natural-language grammars permitting the PC construction a proper subset of those permitting P-stranding.

Universal Grammar and the Acquisition of Japanese Syntax

Within the framework of generative grammar, knowledge of our native language is assumed to be acquired through the interaction between biologically predetermined UG and the linguistic experience children take in after birth. If this acquisitional scenario is on the right track, we can expect that the core portion of the grammar is acquired fairly early, since the innate UG constrains the course of acquisition from the beginning of life and hence children do not have to learn much from the experience. In this chapter, we review several studies on the acquisition of Japanese that directly evaluate the validity of this acquisitional scenario. Since Japanese has various syntactic characteristics that are not observed in Germanic or Romance languages, the investigation of its acquisition process can be especially valuable to determine the plausibility of the above scenario. The properties discussed in this chapter include: basic word order, scrambling, passive, wh-in-situ and its constraints, the anaphoric use of zibun, and structure dependence.

A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study on the basic word order in Japanese

To determine the basic word order in Japanese, oxyhemoglobin concentration changes in the frontal region of 32 healthy men were measured by near-infrared spectroscopy. Our experiment used four types of sentences: (i) subject-object-verb (SOV), (ii) object-subject-verb (OSV), (iii) subject-naze (why)-object-verb (SwhyOV), and (iv) naze (why)-subject-object-verb (whySOV). The results have shown that although oxyhemoglobin changes in the OSV sentences were significantly larger than those in the SOV sentences in the left frontal lobe, such effects were not observed between SwhyOV sentences and whySOV sentences. These results are consistent with the view that both SwhyOV and whySOV are the basic, which suggests that neurolinguistic evidence has the potential to provide an important basis for determining the basic word order in a free word-order language.

Quantifier float and structure dependence in child Japanese

ABSTRACT This study experimentally investigates whether Japanese-speaking children around the age of 4 conform to a structural constraint on Quantifier Float. After pointing out a potential confound in a previous study by Otsu (1994), I report the results of my own experiment, in which this confound in the experimental design is eliminated. The results of this new experiment confirm that the relevant structural constraint is indeed in the grammar of Japanese-speaking preschool children as suggested by Otsu, which in turn provides cross-linguistic support for previous findings regarding preschool children’s adherence to structure dependence.

LF Wh-Movement and its Locality Constraints in Child Japanese

In natural languages, the mapping from surface form to meaning is often quite complex, and hence the acquisition of the phenomena at the boundary between syntax and semantics has been one of the central issues in current acquisition research. This study addresses the issue of whether children have adult-like knowledge of LF wh-movement and its locality constraints. The results of my experiment demonstrate that knowledge of these properties is already in the grammar of Japanese-speaking preschool children. These results corroborate the findings of previous acquisition research on overt wh-movement that even preschool children conform to locality conditions on movement. This finding supports the continuity hypothesis (e.g., Crain & Thornton 1998) from a new perspective, in that the relevant movement occurs in the LF component and hence is invisible in the input children receive.

Cortical activation by syntactic violations in Japanese: an fNIRS study

To investigate the neural correlates of proficiency in second language, we analyzed T1-weighted 3-dimensional structural MRIs obtained from 27 healthy, dextral, native Japanese who had learnt English as a second language. The English Vocabulary Test (EVT) was employed as a representative measure of proficiency in English. The gray matter was segmented from each structural MRI, spatially normalized to fit into a standard gray-matter template, and smoothed with a 12-mm Gaussian kernel (SPM5). A voxel-based morphometry analysis incorporated EVT scores, age and sex. The EVT score was correlated with gray matter volumes in the bilateral inferior frontal gyri, bilateral caudate nuclei, right middle frontal gyrus, and left middle temporal gyrus (p < 0.001 uncorrected, voxel size >150). Structural changes in a set of cortical and subcortical regions might underlie proficiency in second language.