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…

The hypothesis was investigated that conflicting evidence on Japanese intelligence has arisen because the Japanese have a distinctive profile of abilities. It was found that Japanese children do not differ from American children on general intelligence, score higher on the group perceptual factor, and lower on the group verbal factor. (Author/LMO)