| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,200,000、Indirect Cost: ¥300,000)
Fiscal Year 2007: ¥1,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000、Indirect Cost: ¥300,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥1,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥1,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,200,000)
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| Research Abstract |
The main goal of this project is to compare and contrast early phonological data of both English and Japanese from the perspective of markedness. Our main focus is to deepen our understanding concerning the universality and variability of crosslinguistic phonological acquisition.
In our analysis of normal developmental data, we have found that the subminimal word stage proposed by Salidis and Johnson 1997 does not seem to exist in Japanese, and in addition, that the bimoraic minimal word stage seems to play an important role in Japanese, as has also been pointed out in studies related to other languages. Furthermore, the heavy+ light syllable combination seems to recur frequently in the speech error data of child Japanese. In order to test to see whether this syllable combination is the preferred unmarked word shape in Japanese, we conducted a survey on the one mora lexical items of child language in different dialects. If the bimoraic foot is prevalent in child phonology, then we predict that the one mora items will undergo vowel lengthening to conform to the bimoraic template. Contrary to our prediction, however, we found that the bimoraic forms consist only 22.1% of the data, while the heavy+ light syllable combination forms comprise 42.9%, thus implying that there may exist an unmarked word shape of the HL type. This finding suggests that in addition to the bimoraic unmarked foot, there is an unmarked phonological word structure, and the relationship between these two types of unmarked structures needs to be studied in detail in future research.
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