Recursion in Japanese: Syntactic Analysis and Acquisition of Relative Clauses and Locative Phrases

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26370505
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Kitasato University
• Principal Investigator: NAKATO Terue 北里大学, 一般教育部, 准教授 (10451783)
• Co-Investigator(Renkei-kenkyūsha): OKABE Reiko 日本大学, 法学部, 准教授 (60512358)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: 再帰性 / 場所句 / 関係節 / 所有句 / 統語分析 / 第一言語獲得 / 心理言語学 / 国際情報交換

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The goal of this project is to consider whether the ability to generate recursive structures (structures with multiple embedding of the same types of phrases, e.g. an orange [on the plate [on the desk]]) is innate or not. To achieve this goal, we conducted a series of experiments on 3- to 5-year-old Japanese-speaking children and investigated how children comprehend sentences with multiple relative clauses, locative phrases and possessive phrases. The results show that they can assign recursive structures around the age of 3, although individual differences are observed. This suggests that children might have the innate ability to generate recursive structures. However, the results also indicate that they show strong preference for conjunctive structures (an orange [on the plate] [on the desk]) before they use recursive structures in a fully adult-like manner, and that language- or construction-specific properties could delay the emergence of recursive structures in child grammar.

Free Research Field

人文学