Case marker deletion in Japanese language acquisition

Previous studies on the acquisition of Japanese Case markers were mostly concerned with when children or adult learners of Japanese acquire particular Case particles. Often researchers considered that they had acquired Case (e.g., Accusative Case) if they correctly and consistently used a particular Case particle (e.g., ?o?). However, the knowledge of Case marking also includes when to drop the particles. The present paper discusses Japanese Case particle drop in L1 and L2 acquisition. In particular, I will argue against the view that the case drop is governed by ECP and its acquisition is UG-driven. First, I will discuss L2 data that go against the UG access view, and then, I will discuss Case particle drop in L1 acquisition and the data that show the ECP account is incorrect. Finally, I will argue that the acquisition of Case particles is a step by step learning process in both L1 and L2 Japanese.

A similarity-based hypothesis in sentence comprehension

It has been argued that the difficulty of center-embedding is explained in part by a similarity-based interference hypothesis (Lewis, 1996). Lewis and Nakayama (1999, 2001, 2002) provided evidence that the serial position similarity of syntactically similar NP arguments affects the difficulty of Japanese center-embeddings (e.g., GA-marked NP-GA vs. WA-GA/GA-NI-GA). Furthermore, Lee and Nakayama (2003) and Nakayama, Lee, and Lewis (2003) discussed the effects of phonological and semantic similarity, respectively. This talk will review their findings, and then discuss some future research.

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