Comparative Research for a Developmental Index for First and Second Language of Japanese and English

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This project is an extension of our previous international research project, which was funded by a Grant-in-aid for Scientific Research (A)(2) during the period 1999 to 2000. Our project is aimed at elucidating the process of language development in Japanese-learning children during their first five years, and at devising a developmental index for Japanese that may be compared with the developmental index for English.. To this end, we have produced a language database in the CHILDES format, which is an international format for automatic language analysis, from longitudinal observations of three children, as well as from the published data of another child. Based on a corpus of seven children, which included the corpus that we created in our previous research project, we obtained developmental sequences for the following 10 domains of the Japanese language, with five developmental stages for each domain: (1) verb inflection, (2) adjective inflection, (3) adjective noun and copula inflection, (4) negation, (5) sentence conjunction, (6) noun phrase structure, (7) case and topic particle, (8) deixis, (9) question words, and (10) final particle We also devised a developmental order scaling system (SDOS), and applied it to validate the classification of various expressions into developmental stages. It is hoped that this developmental index will be applied, as both a research and a clinical tool, to a wider range of language data, including the speech of children with language impairment