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Children's knowledge of hierarchical phrase structure: quantifier floating in Japanese*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2012

TAKAAKI SUZUKI  and
NAOKO YOSHINAGA
TAKAAKI SUZUKI*
Affiliation:
Kyoto Sangyo University – Department of Foreign Languages
NAOKO YOSHINAGA
Affiliation:
Hirosaki Gakuin University – Department of English Language and Literature
*
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

The interpretation of floating quantifiers in Japanese requires knowledge of hierarchical phrase structure. However, the input to children is insufficient or even misleading, as our analysis indicates. This presents an intriguing question on learnability: do children interpret floating quantifiers based on a structure-dependent rule which is not obvious in the input or do they employ a sentence comprehension strategy based on the available input? Two experiments examined four- to six-year-old Japanese-speaking children for their interpretations of floating quantifiers in SOV and OSV sentences. The results revealed that no child employed a comprehension strategy in terms of the linear ordering of constituents, and most five- and six-year-olds correctly interpreted floating quantifiers when word-order difficulty was reduced. These facts indicate that children's interpretation of floating quantifiers is structurally dependent on hierarchical phrase structure, suggesting that this knowledge is a part of children's grammar despite the insufficient input available to them.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , June 2013 , pp. 628 - 655
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

[*]

We thank William O'Grady for invaluable comments and suggestions, and Jun Nomura for advice on the corpus data analyses. All remaining errors are of course our own. We are also grateful to the children and the staff at Kyoto Sangyo University Sumire Kindergarten for their participation and cooperation. Portions of this research were presented at the 12th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference in 2002, and the 28th Boston University Conference on Language Development in 2003, and appeared in the proceedings.

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