| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,600,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥400,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
Fiscal Year 2004: ¥700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000)
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| Research Abstract |
1. Aims of the study : I demonstrated partly the characteristics of the production of early language by analyzing its prosody as well as phonological features that were obtained from the research study in my dissertation.
2. Analyses : The earlier plan for the things to be analyzed was modified. As the analysis of accent types was not found to be appropriate for the current data, tone types were analyzed. Therefore, the data of the toddlers aged from 2 to 6 year-old, the period of acquiring accent of words, were abandoned. I rather focused on the data from the early language period (up to 2 years old) and analyzed syllable weight.
3. Results :
(1) Syllable weight
(1) The amount of production of HL and HH words was greater than LH words in both the toddlers and mothers.
(2) Contrary to the fact that heavy syllables occupy 25% of the contemporary Japanese language, the proportion of light and heavy syllables in production by toddlers was fifty-fifty.
(3) Heavy syllables in mothers' utterance d
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irected to children (CDS) were observed 20% more than in general adults, which was closer to the those of toddlers.
(4) Syllable weight in one word was compared between the toddlers and mothers : the agreement rate started to increase in the last half of the early language period when the vocabulary of production reached 30 words. In the period of 50 to 60 in vocabulary before developing two-word sentences, the agreement rate reached 44.9%.
(2) Tone types (for 2-syllable & 2 mora-words)
(1) Tone types were observed as follows : High-Low (the first syllable is the highest : atamadaka) type (40.5%), Low-High (the final the highest : odaka) type (39.2%), and Flat (heiban) type being the least. While Amano et al., (1999) analyzed only nouns, I evaluated all the utterance that could stand acoustic analysis without classifying word classes and pragmatic functions. The result of High-Low being the most frequent was consistent with the argument by Amano et al.. The current results, however, also showed that the frequency of Low-High tone type was as high as High-Low.
(2) By analyzing individually the process of acquiring language, toddlers first showed one type of tone types and then developed different types in the last quarter of the early language period.
4. Where the study stands among related research in worldwide: The results of the current study were not published. I will publish them by adding further analyses of the items which were not targeted in the current study. Less
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