L2 Acquisition of Null Arguments in Japanese

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15H06418
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Research Activity Start-up
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Notre Dame Seishin University
• Principal Investigator: Kizu Mika (田中) ノートルダム清心女子大学, 文学部, 教授 (00759037)
• Research Collaborator: YAMADA Kazumi
• Project Period (FY): 2015-08-28 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: 空主語 / 第二言語習得 / 日本語教育

Outline of Final Research Achievements

We conducted experiments for null subjects in L2 Japanese. The experiments consisted of two tasks: one was to identify the referent of the subject, and the other was to judge the acceptability of overt versus null subjects in context. The results for Chinese, English, and Korean advanced learners of L2 Japanese (n=90) were compared to those of Japanese native speakers (n=30). Interestingly, there is a significant difference for the identification task between those in Chinese/English groups and in the control group. However, the results for the acceptability judgment task do not display the expected dichotomy but require more language specific accounts depending on the sentence types. These findings show that their L1 knowledge impinges on the Chinese and English learners’ performance, which supports Miyazawa’s (2017) typology on feature agreement. The acceptability task results can be explained partly from the viewpoint of the effect of micro-parameters (Baker 2008).

Free Research Field

言語学