Language acquisition and language use - Psycholinguistic experiments on Japanese verbs

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24720192
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Nihon University
• Principal Investigator: OKABE Reiko 日本大学, 法学部, 准教授 (60512358)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 心理言語学 / 言語獲得 / 動詞

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The aim of the study was to elucidate how children acquire some constructions related to meanings and structures of Japanese verbs, focusing on both psycholinguistic factors that make acquisition of a certain construction difficult and linguistic faculty that makes acquisition possible.
Experiments along with analyses of naturalistic speech data revealed that children aged 3-6 already acquire linguistic knowledge regarding scrambling sentences, dative subject construction, passives, and verbal compounds. I claim that the children already have adult-like knowledge that cannot be acquired based only on input from adults.

Free Research Field

心理言語学