Recursive NPs are difficult to produce and late to emerge. We compare prosodic and syntactic abilities in Japanese-speaking five- and six-year-olds (n = 28) and adults (n = 10). It is reported that syntactic structure in Japanese is prosodically marked via downstep and metrical boost. Results of an elicited imitation task suggested that children…

The present study investigated the canonical position of instrumental and locative adverbial phrases in both Japanese sentences and noun phrases to determine whether the canonical positions are parallel. A series of sentence/phrase decision tasks were used to compare sentences with different word-orders, including sentences with SA"dv"OV…

The aim of this study is to advance understading of teachers' and researchers' work, in particular its cultural specificities, from a resource perspective by exploring the issues and challenges faced during the translation of a theoretical framework, the Documentational Approach to Didactics (DAD), from Western (English and French) to East Asian…

This article revisits Lee and Mok (2018) and examines how the Cantonese learners in the study produced second language (L2) Japanese short vs. long consonants which are absent in their first language (L1). Specifically, our goal is to find out whether these learners were substituting real geminates (i.e. long consonants) with the improvised…

In an upcoming coverage-comprehension study, we plan to assess learners' meaning-recall knowledge of words as they occur in the study's reading passage. As several meaning-recall test formats exist, the purpose of this small-scale study (N = 10) was to determine which of three formats was most similar to a criterion interview regarding mean score…

Subject relative clauses (RCs) have been shown to be acquired earlier, comprehended more accurately, and produced more easily than object RCs by children. While this subject preference is often claimed to be a universal tendency, it has largely been investigated piecemeal and with low-powered experiments. To address these issues, this…

This article investigates whether first-language (L1) Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese as a second language (L2) can acquire the knowledge that the reflexive pronoun jibun 'self' within the head noun phrase of Japanese relative clauses cannot refer to the relative clause subject. Successful acquisition would suggest that learners are able to…

Semantic variables enable L2 researchers and materials creators to quantify and control the effects of meaning on cognition. However, in recent years, many variables have been normed and published. Parsing the methods employed in norming this myriad of variables and which disparate theories informed their creation can be an opaque and arduous…

In this article we look at some of the structural properties of second language (L2) Japanese WH questions. In Japanese the WH words are licensed to remain "in situ" by the prosodic contiguity properties of the phrases which have no prosodic boundaries between the WH word and the question particle. In a rehearsed-reading, sentence…

Although the Japanese reflexive "zibun" can be bound both locally and across clause boundaries, the third-person pronoun "kare" cannot take a local antecedent. These are properties that children need to learn about their language, but we show that the direct evidence of the binding possibilities of "zibun" is sparse…

With the development of language corpora, linguists have been able to identify how often specific words, phrases, and expressions are used, and in which contexts. However, applications of corpora in the wider domain of language teaching have remained limited. This article presents an approach to utilizing corpora, combining principles from…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

There is emerging evidence that collocation use plays a primary role in determining various dimensions of L2 oral proficiency assessment and development. The current study presents the results of three experiments which examined the relationship between the degree of association in collocation use (operationalized as t scores and mutual…