Tense/aspect morphology on verbs is often thought to depend on event features like telicity, but it is not known how speakers identify these features in visual scenes. To examine this question, we asked Japanese speakers to describe computer-generated animations of simple actions with variation in visual features related to telicity. Experiments…

This article investigates the acquisition of empathy verbs in child Japanese, focusing on verbs of giving/receiving: "age-ru" 'give,' "kure-ru" 'give,' and "mora(w)-u" 'receive.' These verbs are distinguished by which argument the speaker empathizes with when describing an event. For "age-ru" 'give,' the…

Modifying and hedging one's claims appropriately is an important characteristic of academic writing. This study focuses on the three main English modal verbs used to express "epistemic possibility" to avoid making strong statements, viz., "may", "might", and "could". The purpose of this corpus-based study is…

The acquisition of verb morphology is often studied using categorical criteria for determining the productivity of a morpheme. Applying this approach to Japanese, an agglutinative language, this study finds no consistent order for morpheme acquisition and that productivity could be explained by sampling effects. To examine morpheme acquisition…

As Chinese shows both satellite- and verb-framed properties (Slobin, 2004; Talmy, 2012, 2016), it provides a unique lens through which to observe the extent of first-language (L1) typological influence in second language (L2) acquisition of motion expressions. This study has dual purposes. First, it extends Wu's (2016) investigation on motion…

This report proposes a number of tasks which help learners become more aware of how their feelings are moulded in their L1 and notice crosslinguistic similarities and differences between their L1 and a target language. The proposed tasks are motivated by findings in the crosslinguistic influence literature and a study that investigated Japanese…

Mental state terms are believed to be closely related to the development of Theory of Mind (ToM). This study focuses on mental state verbs (MSVs) and investigates how they are used by Japanese-speaking mother-child dyads compared to their English-speaking counterparts. Analyses of their spontaneous speech from the CHILDES archives show that…

Children acquire argument structure through distributional evidence, but how does this interacts with event semantics and existing verb knowledge? The current study compares verb learning in adult speakers of Japanese (where lexical causatives span wider semantic categories) and English (where alternation is more restricted). In the Fully…

This study focused on the grammatical accuracy of Japanese students who were learning English. The database for the errors came from the Japanese University Student Corpus (JUSC) comprising 61 transcripts containing 51,061 words. An inventory, containing 400 errors in context, was taken from this corpus. The first research question related to the…

Syntactic bootstrapping facilitates children's initial learning of verb meanings based on syntactic information. A challenging case is the argument-drop languages, where the number of argument NPs is not a reliable cue for distinguishing between transitive and intransitive verbs. Despite this fact, the availability of syntactic bootstrapping in…

This article proposes an approach to explicit grammar instruction that seeks to develop metalinguistic knowledge of the L2 and raise L2 learners' awareness of their L1, which is crucial for the success of second language acquisition (Ellis 1997, 2002). If explicit instruction is more effective than implicit instruction (Norris and Ortega 2000),…

Though generally under-utilised in spoken English, the passive voice plays a crucial role in formal, written English (Biber et al., 1999). An understanding of how the passive voice operates in English writing is therefore a vital skill for EFL learners in secondary and higher education so that they may be able to both understand and produce fluent…

A number of previous studies showed that comprehenders make use of lexically based constraints such as subcategorization frequency in processing structurally ambiguous sentences. One piece of such evidence is lexically specific syntactic priming in comprehension; following the costly processing of a temporarily ambiguous sentence, comprehenders…

This study was designed to examine whether infants acquiring languages that place a differential emphasis on nouns and verbs, focus their attention on motions or objects in the presence of a novel word. An infant-controlled habituation paradigm was used to teach 18- to 20-month-old English-, French-, and Japanese-speaking infants' novel words for…

There have been many studies on the acquisition of English unaccusative verbs which make use of learner corpora. Most of these studies have so far concluded that even advanced learners of English ungrammatically passivize unaccusative verbs and produce sentences such as "*The accident was happened" and "*The mobile phone was…