A Crosslinguistic Study for the Universal Developmental Index

我们项目最初的目标是制定一个日语的发展指数，与英语的发展指数进行比较，并在四年内提出通用的发展指数。然而，项目期限缩短为两年，我们专注于基于我们收集的三个纵向观察日本儿童的语料库来开发日语的发展指数。我们分析了日语中下列表达的发展顺序：(1)使节，(2)否定，(3)格小品，(4)动词形态，(5)连词和连接小品，(6)名词短语结构，(7)代词和指示，(8)名词性分类，(9)句子末小品，（10）包括礼貌形式的观点表达。将个体结果与文献进行比较，其中大多数文献描述了仅使用一个孩子的发展过程。在此基础上，建立了发展顺序标度系统，并应用该系统得到了发展指标。未来，我们的发展指数将进一步通过纵向数据进行验证，同时也将在大量的横截面数据上进行检验。

The original goals of our project are to develop a developmental index for Japanese, to compare it with the developmental index for English, and to propose the universal developmental index in four years.However the project term was reduced into two years, we focused on developing a developmental index for Japanese based on our collected corpora three longitudinally observed Japanese children. We analyzed the developmental sequences of the following expressions in Japanese : (1) causative, (2) negation, (3) case particle, (4) verb morphology, (5) conjunction and conjunctive particle, (6) noun phrase structure, (7) pronoun and deixis, (8) nominal classifier, (9) sentence final particle, and (10) perspective expresseion including polite form.The individual results were compared with the literature most of which described the course of the development using only one child. Furthermore we developed a developmental order scaling system, and applied it to get a developmental index.In future, our developmental index will be verified with further longitudinal data, and also be tested on a large number of cross-sectional data.