Development of Mind : Language Development

语言发展组以构建语言发展理论为目标，对语言的音韵学、词汇、句法、语义等各个方面进行了实证和理论研究。我们的重点是探索语言发展的生物（先天）基础和经验在语言发展过程中的作用，以及生物基础和经验之间的相互作用。我们调查了不同语言的习得过程，特别强调日语和英语。在方法上，有些是实验性的，有些是基于对儿童话语数据的分析。我们发现，特定语言的生物学基础与语言习得过程密切相关，并且生物学基础包含的参数值是根据经验确定的。另一方面，在单词含义等领域，有人认为内部偏差可能是学习的结果，而不是生物学上的给定，这将是我们未来研究的主题。

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.