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Part of
Studies in Chinese and Japanese Language Acquisition: In honor of Stephen Crain
Edited by Mineharu Nakayama, Yi-ching Su and Aijun Huang
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 60] 2017
► pp. 127–144

Chapter 6
The acquisition of the non-subject status of nominative objects in Japanese

| Meiji Gakuin University
| Meiji Gakuin University
| University of Connecticut

This paper examines the L1 acquisition of the Japanese nominative object construction and discusses its implication for the Universal Phase Requirement (UPR) Hypothesis in Wexler (2004) and Hirsch and Wexler (2007). Although the results of our first experiment could be interpreted as evidence against the UPR Hypothesis, we raise the question of whether this interpretation is legitimate, and discuss what should be considered in a suitable evaluation of the UPR Hypothesis with the nominative object construction. Given the finding in our second experiment, our third experiment provides some preliminary data that suggest that the L1 acquisition of the Japanese nominative object construction may support the UPR Hypothesis.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.“Nominative objects” in Early Child Japanese: Spontaneous speech data
  • 3.Experiment 1: Sano, Shimada & Fujiwara (2014)
    • 3.1Participants and experimental design
    • 3.2Results and discussion
  • 4.Experiment 2: Shimada (2015)
    • 4.1Participants and experimental design
    • 4.2Results and discussion
  • 5.Experiment 3
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • List of abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 24 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.60.07san
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