The development of metalinguistic awareness for linguistic politeness was examined in 68 Japanese-speaking children aged between three and five years old. A politeness judgement task was administered together with several phonological judgement tasks and false-belief tasks. Four- and five-year old Japanese children, but not three-year-olds, made…

It has been repeatedly shown that when asked to identify a protagonist's false belief on the basis of his false statement, English-speaking 3-year-olds dismiss the statement and fail to attribute to him a false belief. In the present studies, we tested 3-year-old Japanese children in a similar task, using false statements accompanied by…

The topic of bilingualism has aroused considerable interest in research on language acquisition in recent decades. Researchers in various fields, such as developmental psychology and psycholinguistics, have investigated bilingual populations from different perspectives in order to understand better how bilingualism affects cognitive abilities like…

This study examines the process of Japanese language maintenance or shift among children who were exposed to Japanese and English through the "one parent-one language" approach in Melbourne. The aim was to identify factors that correlate with successful and unsuccessful cases of Japanese language maintenance of such children. The data…

This paper discusses the historical conditions and socio-political factors affecting the development of Japanese language schools in Hawaii. It traces the development of these schools from the time they were established to prepare Japanese children for their eventual return to Japan through years of legal battles and disfavor to the present, when…

Most of the population of Japan remains ethnically Japanese. For this reason, bilingualism has never been a subject of significant concern in Japan. With the recent influx of new groups of non-Japanese speakers into Japan, the society is becoming more multilingual. This book introduces the way languages are used in Japanese interlingual families,…

This final substantive report includes the working papers presented by the American and Japanese participants, notes on discussions, a summary of an address by William Labov, and draft proposals for joint sociolinguistic research. The working papers involve several sociolinguistic issues in Japanese-American and Japanese culture. The American…

This edited volume includes the following chapters: "Three Kinds of Sociolinguistics and SLA: A Psycholinguistic Perspective" (Dennis R. Preston); "Getting Serious about Language Play: Language Play, Interlanguage Variation, and Second Language Acquisition" (Elaine Tarone); "Oppositional Talk and the Acquisition of Modality in L2 English" (Tom…