Cognitive Scientific Research on the Roles of Universal Grammar and Experience in Grammar Acquisition

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This project was intended to explore the nature of interaction between Universal Grammar and experience by investigating processes of grammar acquisition in detail. We conducted a series of experiments with 3- and 4-year-olds as subjects. Those experiments were designed to clarify the acquisition of basic phrase structure of Japanese.The following is the summary of our findings :1 The basic word order of transitive sentences(i.e., subject-object-verb) and its "scrambled" order are acquired by the third or the fourth year. It has been demonstrated that the past reports to the effect that the scrambled sentences are difficult even for 5- and 6-year-olds are experimental artifacts.2 Young children's grammar is essentially the same as adults' in that the former involves(abstract) hierarchical structure.3 Young children can make the structural distinction between case markers and postpositions.In view of the poverty of the relevant stimulus, we argue that those findings lend a strong support to the position that domain-specific Universal Grammar plays an important role in grammar acquisition. At the same time, since 1 - 3 also involve properties peculiar to Japanese (and the languages of the same type), it must be concluded that experience also plays an important role.By continuing the same line of research with younger children as subjects, it is expected that we will be able to pin down more fully the nature of interaction between Universal Grammar and experience.