2005 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
The Development of Japanese and English Grammars in Child Second Language Acquisition
| Project/Area Number |
15520368
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Foreign language education
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| Research Institution | Tokyo International University |
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Principal Investigator |
HIRAKAWA Makiko Tokyo International University, School of International Relations, Professor, 国際関係学部, 教授 (60275807)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2003 – 2005
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| Keywords | second language acquisition / grammar development / Universal Grammar / Japanese / English / verbs / argument structure / grammatical morphemes |
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| Research Abstract |
The goals of this research project were to observe second language development of Japanese and English by English-speaking and Japanese-speaking children respectively, compare the developmental stages of linguistic knowledge (grammar), and investigate the extent to which universal factors are involved in second language acquisition as well as the extent to which properties in the first language influence the acquisition of the second language. In the first year, three English-speaking children were individually video-recorded in naturalistic interaction with the investigator. Experimental studies were also conducted. During the second and third years, the naturalistic speech data collected in the first year and the data of two Japanese-speaking children learning English (collected prior to this project) were transcribed according to the CHAT (English) and JCHAT (Japanese) transcription systems. Further work is required in order to complete the data files. Experimental studies were also
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administered to adult learners. The results were analyzed and compared with the results of child learners.
This research project focused on the following issues :
1.Verbs and their argument structures (unaccusative, unergative, and transitive verbs).
2.Case (marking) on the argument (e.g., ‘ga' and ‘o' in Japanese, nominative and accusative in English).
3.Grammatical morphemes (e.g., inchoative and transitive ‘-are/-ase' in Japanese, passive ‘be+Ved' in English)
The main findings of the project were the following :
4.Both child and adult learners generally know the two types of intransitive verbs (unaccusative vs. unergative) and the argument structure of each verb type (i.e., universal properties)
5.Due to the differences in lexical conceptual structures in the two languages, errors in second languages were also observed (i.e., language specific properties).
6.Explicit teaching (i.e., negative evidence) on such errors was found effective to some extent for a short term, but further research is needed in order to identify its long-term effectiveness. Less
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