Children’s Interpretation of Japanese Particles in Complex Sentences

This paper discusses how monolingual children speaking Japanese as their first language interpret the particles, WA and GA, in complex sentences. Previous studies (Nakaiwa et al. 1995, Uchida, at al. 1995, Nariyama 2002) reported adult Japanese-speakers’ tendency of interpreting WA marking as a coreference with the elided subject while GA marking as a different subject. The current study examined children speaking L1 Japanese in a pictureselection task. Results show that children distinguished the particles similarly to adults in most conditions, while performing differently when WA appeared in the middle of a sentence.