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Part of
Three Streams of Generative Language Acquisition Research: Selected papers from the 7th Meeting of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Edited by Tania Ionin and Matthew Rispoli
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 63] 2019
► pp. 143–157

The acquisition of V-V compounds in Japanese

| Tokyo University of the Arts
| Senshu University
Japanese verbal compounds (V-V compounds) are known to consist of two verbs where a first verb in the preverbal form is adjoined to a second verb. Theoretical studies have demonstrated that there are two types of V-V compounds in Japanese: lexical and syntactic V-V compounds. Although the two classes of V-V compounds are superficially similar, they are notably distinct in many syntactic and semantic aspects and thus a question arises as to how children come to distinguish these two types of compounds. This study examines whether Japanese-speaking children aged 4–5 can differentiate the two types of Japanese V-V compounds. Our experiment revealed that there is a developmental stage in which children have acquired lexical V-V compounds but not syntactic ones.
Keywords: verbal compounds, Japanese, experiment
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies
    • 2.1Syntactic background
    • 2.2Acquisition studies
      • 2.2.1Lexical V-V compounds
      • 2.2.2Syntactic V-V compounds
  • 3.Experiment
    • 3.1Method
      • 3.1.1Participants
      • 3.1.2Procedure and materials
    • 3.2Results
  • 4.Discussion and concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.63.08iso
References (28)
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