On syntactic parsing by Japanese-speaking children

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I have investigated whether preschool children parse sentences in the same way as adult native speakers of Japanese do. Relative clauses (e.g., the girl who saw the boy) and scrambled sentences (non-canonical word order) involves movement of noun phrases, whose effect was observed in adults' sentences processing. However, this effect was not generally observed in children's sentence processing. I suggest that this is because preschool children are still in the developmental stage of acquiring case markers and discourse-pragmatic abilities ; therefore, they cannot fully utilize case-marking cue and information structure for sentence comprehension.