The acquisition of past tense markers has often been considered to parallel conceptual development in the domain of time (e.g., Weist, 1986). However, the precise relationship between linguistic marking of time in children's speech and conceptual development has not been investigated in data-based research. This study analyses longitudinal speech data from four Japanese children to determine whether the use of the past tense form actually coincides with its use to signal past time. The results show that the relationship between contrastive use of the form and truly deictic past is not a straightforward one; for all the children, deictic use emerges later than the contrastive use of past and nonpast forms.
This paper reports on the development and use of the Developmental Sentence Scoring for Japanese (DSSJ), a new morpho-syntactical measure for Japanese constructed after the model of the English Developmental Sentence Scoring model (Lee, 1974). Using this measure, we calculated DSSJ scores for 84 children divided into six age groups between 2;8 and 5;2 on the basis of 100-sentence samples collected from free-play child-adult conversations. The analysis showed a high correlation of the DSSJ overall score with the Mean Length of Utterance. The analysis of the DSSJ subarea scores revealed large variations between these subarea scores for children with similar overall DSSJ scores. When investigating the high-scoring children (over 1 SD over group average), most children scored high in three to five subareas, but the combination of scores for these subareas varied from child to child. It is concluded that DSSJ is a valuable tool especially for the language acquisition research. The overall DSSJ score reliably reflects the overall morpho-syntactic development of Japanese children, and the subarea scores provide specific information on individual acquisition patterns.
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