The Acquisition of Transitivity in Japanese and Korean Children*

Children demonstrate a clear understanding of transitivity by the time they are four years old, if not earlier (Pye 1983, Berman 1993, Brooks and Tomasello 1999). However, exactly how they achieve such a state is far from clear. First of all, there is a question of how they start the process of acquiring transitivity. One might think that intransitive verbs would be the first to be acquired, since they require only one argument, instead of two for transitive verbs or three for ditransitive verbs. In fact, this appears to be the path that children acquiring Japanese take, as studies on acquisition of verbs in Japanese have repeatedly shown that Japanese children’s early verbs are predominantly intransitive (Nomura and Shirai 1997, Tsujimura 2006).1