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A case-marking cue for filler–gap dependencies in children's relative clauses in Japanese*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2011

TAKAAKI SUZUKI
TAKAAKI SUZUKI*
Affiliation:
Kyoto Sangyo University
*
Address for correspondence: Takaaki Suzuki, Department of Foreign Languages, Kyoto Sangyo University, Motoyama-Kamigamo, Kita-ku, Kyoto, Japan603-8555. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Object relative clauses have traditionally been thought to be more difficult than subject relative clauses in child English. However, recent studies as well as Japanese data show contradictory results. This study disclosed preschool children's superior performance on object relative clauses in Japanese; however, this dominance disappeared for the children who could use both the nominative and accusative case markers as cues for the comprehension of single-argument sentences. Assuming a filler–gap dependency for the relative clause formation, we suggest that there is no difference in the difficulty between subject and object relative clauses in the grammar of Japanese-speaking children.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 38 , Issue 5 , November 2011 , pp. 1084 - 1095
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

[*]

The experiments were carried out as a seminar project by the author and the following students: Mari Saito, Masami Sato, Hiroaki Tanaka, Takako Uchida and Yukari Yamada. A portion of this project was presented at the 10th Annual International Conference of the Japanese Society for Language Sciences (JSLS 2008) and will appear in the proceedings. This research was supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) 19520373 from The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan, and Kyoto Sangyo University Research Grants.

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