Development of Mind : Language Development

语言发展小组旨在构建语言发展理论，并对语言的各个方面进行了实证和理论研究，包括语音学，词汇，句法和语义。本研究主要探讨语言发展的生物学（先天）基础、经验在语言发展过程中的作用以及生物学基础与经验之间的相互作用，并以日语和英语为重点，对各种语言的习得过程进行了研究。在研究方法上，有的是实验性的，有的是基于对儿童话语数据的分析，我们发现语言的生物学基础与语言习得过程密切相关，生物学基础中包含的参数的值是根据经验确定的。另一方面，在词义等领域，有人认为，内部偏见可能是学习的结果，而不是生物学上给定的，这将是我们未来的研究课题。

The Language Development Group aimed at constructing a theory of language development, and conducted empirical and theoretical research on various aspects of language including phonology, lexicon, syntax, and semantics. We focused on exploring the biological (innate) foundations of language development and the role of experience in the process of language development as well as the interaction between the biological foundations and experience.We investigated acquisition processes of various languages with particular emphasis on Japanese and English. As for methodology, some were experimental while others were based on the analysis of children's utterance data.We have found that language-specific biological foundations are deeply involved in the process of language acquisition, and that the biological foundations contain parameters whose values are to be fixed against experience. On the other hand, in such areas as word meaning, it was suggested that the internal biases can be results of learning rather than given biologically, which will be a topic of our future research.