Development of Mind : Language Development

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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.