EAPSI: Children's early analyses of Japanese null objects

Fetters Michael A, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

Japanese is a language that allows for direct and indirect objects of verbs to be instantiated as null content, linguistic content that does not have a pronunciation, to a much more productive degree than English does. Thus, Japanese provides a fertile area of research for investigating how children learning their first language create mental representations for words and phrases that they never actually hear. Japanese monolingual preschool children provide an ideal population for studying this property of human language, as they are still within the period of syntactic development while being old enough to respond to more complex experimental methodologies. Understanding this linguistic phenomenon is a very integral part of building our understanding of language development. In turn, theories of typical grammar building should be used to unpack the specific challenges and potential causes of atypical language development and linguistic impairment. Further objectives of this research include setting the groundwork for comparative studies between Japanese and English-speaking children. This study will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Koji Sugisaki at Mie University in Japan. The primary objective of this research is to investigate how children mentally represent linguistic content that does not have a pronunciation, referred to a "null content" in the theoretical literature. The acquisition path of these particular mental representations is the learning problem under investigation. For the experiments described in this study, four-year-old Japanese-speaking children would witness a particular context of events acted out in from of them, coupled with a description of the events from a puppet. The puppet's description of the events would include an unpronounced object, and the preceding contexts would be set up so that the child's response regarding the truth or falsity of the puppet's reveals their interpretation of the missing object in the puppet's statement. In this way, the experiments will provide a carefully controlled window into which grammatical interpretations of these missing objects children entertain. This NSF EAPSI award is funded in collaboration with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.