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Children's Acquisition ofCausatives and Bi-clausality in Japanese: An Experimental Study

The aim of this study is to shed light on children's comprehension of Japanese causative constructions by looking at experimental data. Since the 1960's, a number of studies on Japanese causatives have been done. Despite the fact that there is a fair amount of work in this area, there are only a few acquisition studies. Furthermore, there are only a few studies on acquisition of complex complementation in general (Limber 1973, Hyams 1986). Thus, the primary goal of the current study is to provide experimental data concerning children's comprehension of the causative constructions and examine whether children can build a bi-clausal structure for one of the causative constructions in Japanese. This paper is organized as follows: in section 2, we will survey syntactic analyses of two distinct types of Japanese causatives. In section 3, we will examine the children's acquisition of causatives and the results of the experiments will be reported. In section 4, we will discuss what the results of the experiments tell us about the children's ability to build a mono-clausal structure and a biclausal structure. Section 5 concludes this study.