One Child, Two Languages: Bilingual First Language Acquisition in Japanese and English Yuki ...

319 Pages·2013·1.78 MB·English

One Child, Two Languages:
Bilingual First Language Acquisition in
Japanese and English

Yuki Itani-Adams

A thesis presented to the University of Western Sydney in fulfilment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

August, 2007
© Yuki Itani-Adams, 2007
Acknowledgements

I am indebted to many people who supported and encouraged me during my years of
research towards this thesis. The support and encouragement came in many different
forms – from valuable academic advice to telephone calls from friends for a chat. I
appreciated them all and I know I would not have achieved what I did without that
support. As much as I would like to list everyone’s name to express my gratitude,
space limits me to name only a few.

My deepest gratitude goes to my supervisory committee members, Bruno Di Biase,
Satomi Kawaguchi and George Saunders. I especially thank Bruno and Satomi for
the continuous guidance, encouragement and friendship they gave me over the years.
As I worked on my research in a country town far from the university, their prompt
reply to my inquiries by either telephone or e-mail kept my research flowing.
Without their support, I would not have been able to complete this thesis today.
I would like to thank Manfred Pienemann, who introduced me to the world of
language acquisition and Processability Theory and encouraged me to embark on
PhD research in the area of my interest. Without Processability Theory, the depth and
scope of my research would not have been what it is today. I also thank him for his
continuous interest in my research. I would also like to thank Gisela Håkansson,
Yanyin Zhang, Junko Iwasaki, Yumiko Yamaguchi and other participants who
gathered at the annual Processability Symposia, for their interest and encouragement
for my work when we met at the symposia. I also thank Malcolm Johnston who
kindly spent time on the telephone explaining the grammatical theories to me.

This study would not have been possible without the informant and her family. I
deeply thank them for their willingness to participate in my study and their sharing
my interest in bilingualism. I wish to express my deepest thanks to Geoff Adams
who assisted me in many ways at all levels of my research. Geoff assisted me with
technical matters ranging from setting up audio-visual equipment during the data-
collection stage to computer support during the data-analysis stage, which included
the writing of various computer programs for the analyses. Such technical assistance
extended the scope of analysis possible. I would also like to thank Geoff for
reviewing the non-target-like English grammar of the early drafts of my chapters. My
thanks also go to Yoshiko Ohkura and Jo Pearson for their assistance with the
transcription of the data. I also wish to thank Peter Cerone for taking time to read a
draft of this thesis and for his advice to improve it.

My thanks also go to my editor, Elizabeth Murphy BA(Hons) (Linguistics, ANU),
member of the Canberra Society of Editors, who fortunately has a background in
psycholinguistics, for helping me improve my English to make my thesis more
readable. Elizabeth’s editorial assistance was restricted to the language of the text
and overall consistency of expression. Her advisory notes were provided on hard
copy of the text. Her linguistics background assisted her when reading the text, but
she gave no advice on the substance or structure of the thesis. Her advice was
restricted to that allowed under the policy developed between the Council of
Australian Societies of Editors and the Deans and Directors of Graduate Studies of
many universities across Australia. She restricted her work to that coming under
Standards D (Language and Illustrations) and E (Completeness and Consistency) of
the Australian Standards for Editing Practice. Elizabeth is willing to be contacted to
confirm this summary of her editorial advice – phone (Australia) 02 6286 6722.

I wish to express special thanks to my parents and brother for their continuous love
and support. Their frequent telephone calls and e-mail messages across the seas gave
me the strength to continue my study. Parcels from my parents arrived at my door
step whenever I felt the need for cheering up and they indeed brightened my grey
days. I am grateful to my parents for giving me the opportunity to learn my second
language, English, in Australia so many years ago. That was when I began my
journey of bilingualism. I also thank my family-in-law for their understanding and
support – especially the help they gave to care for my children when I needed to be
away from home attending various symposia. Finally yet most importantly, I thank
my own family, Geoff, Mari, Takuma and Daishi. I cannot express in words how
grateful I am to them all for their understanding, unfailing support and
encouragement to pursue my own interests, and their interest in what I was interested
in. Although I was the one who was doing the research, they were all always with me,
taking this journey towards a PhD together with me. I am happy today that I can
finally present the result of our journey together.
Statement of Authentication

The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original
except as acknowledged in the text. I hereby declare that I have not submitted this
material, either in full or in part, for a degree at this or any other institution.

__________________________
Yuki Itani-Adams, 2007
Table of Contents

List of Tables.............................................................................................................v
List of Figures.........................................................................................................viii
Abbreviations ...........................................................................................................ix
Abstract....................................................................................................................xi
1 Introduction........................................................................................................1
1.1 Aim............................................................................................................1
1.2 Issues arising from previous studies of bilingual first language acquisition.2
1.3 Description of thesis structure.....................................................................6
2 Background........................................................................................................8
2.1 Introduction................................................................................................8
2.2 Description of English and Japanese grammars...........................................9
2.2.1 A brief sketch of feature unification in Lexical Functional Grammar10
2.2.2 Word order and encoding of grammatical relations...........................11
2.2.3 Morphology......................................................................................15
2.2.4 Summary..........................................................................................18
2.3 Terminology and concepts in the studies of Bilingual First Language
Acquisition..........................................................................................................19
2.4 Lexical development ................................................................................22
2.4.1 The relationship between the two developing languages of bilingual
children: Lexicon.............................................................................................23
2.4.2 Description of children’s lexical development...................................27
2.5 The acquisition of morphosyntax..............................................................33
2.5.1 The relationship between the two developing languages of bilingual
children: Morphosyntax ...................................................................................34
2.5.2 Description of monolingual children’s morphosyntactic development43
2.5.3 The relationship between lexicon and grammar.................................55
2.5.4 Summary..........................................................................................60
2.6 Theoretical framework for the present study.............................................61
2.6.1 A brief description of Levelt's language production model................63
2.6.2 Processability Theory........................................................................67
2.6.3 Review of empirical studies on application of PT to SLA .................75
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2.6.4 Comparison between L1 and L2 acquisitions: Application of PT to L1
acquisition........................................................................................................86
2.6.5 Summary..........................................................................................92
3 Research methodology.....................................................................................94
3.1 Introduction..............................................................................................94
3.2 Research questions...................................................................................95
3.3 Informant ...............................................................................................101
3.3.1 Family background.........................................................................102
3.3.2 Hannah’s linguistic environment.....................................................103
3.4 Data........................................................................................................106
3.4.1 Study design...................................................................................106
3.4.2 Data collection................................................................................107
3.4.3 Transcription..................................................................................112
3.4.4 Coding of computer data.................................................................117
3.5 Description of metadata of the analysed corpora.....................................120
3.5.1 Word counts...................................................................................120
3.5.2 Mixed utterances.............................................................................122
3.6 Linguistic Analysis.................................................................................126
3.6.1 Mean length of utterance (MLU).....................................................127
3.6.2 Lexical development.......................................................................128
3.6.3 Word order.....................................................................................132
3.6.4 Acquisition of morphology.............................................................132
4 Results and Discussion...................................................................................139
4.1 Introduction............................................................................................139
4.2 MLU......................................................................................................140
4.2.1 Hannah’s Japanese and English MLU.............................................140
4.2.2 Comparison of Hannah’s Japanese and English MLU.....................144
4.2.3 Comparison of Hannah’s MLU to that of L1 MLU in the literature.146
4.2.4 Summary........................................................................................148
4.3 Lexical development in a general context...............................................148
4.3.1 Lexicon...........................................................................................149
4.3.2 Type-token ratio.............................................................................152
4.3.3 Summary........................................................................................153
4.4 Lexical development in a specific context...............................................153
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4.4.1 Composition of lexicon...................................................................154
4.4.2 Personal pronouns...........................................................................158
4.4.3 Summary........................................................................................159
4.5 Acquisition of morphology.....................................................................161
4.5.1 Acquisition of Japanese morphology...............................................162
4.5.2 Acquisition of English morphology.................................................184
4.5.3 Comparison with other L1 findings.................................................208
4.5.4 Application of PT to Hannah’s morphological development............212
4.6 Word order.............................................................................................219
4.6.1 Japanese word order........................................................................220
4.6.2 English word order.........................................................................221
4.6.3 Summary........................................................................................222
4.7 Lexical-Grammatical Development Connection......................................223
5 Conclusion.....................................................................................................226
5.1 Overview of the study.............................................................................226
5.2 The findings of the study........................................................................227
5.2.1 The acquisition of morphology and syntax......................................227
5.2.2 Lexical development.......................................................................233
5.2.3 The relationship between lexical development and the acquisition of
grammar 235
5.3 Suggestions for further studies and future work......................................236
6 References .....................................................................................................240
Appendix A Japanese romanisation.......................................................................256
Appendix B Format for glosses..............................................................................258
Appendix C Session codes, duration and Hannah’s age..........................................259
Appendix D Transcription conventions..................................................................260
Appendix E Hannah’s MLUs.................................................................................263
Appendix F Examples of Hannah’s Japanese utterances.........................................264
Appendix G Examples of Hannah’s Egnlish utterances..........................................272
Appendix H New English nominals in each period.................................................276
Appendix I New English verbs in each period........................................................281
Appendix J New Japanese nominals in each period................................................283
Appendix K New Japanese verbs in each period....................................................293
Appendix L English 20 most frequently used words in each period........................301
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Appendix M Japanese 20 most frequently used words in each period.....................302

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List of Tables
Table 2.1 Examples of Japanese verbal morphemes.................................................16
Table 2.2 Volterra and Taeschner’s (1978) three-stage model..................................24
Table 2.3 Brown’s stages.........................................................................................44
Table 2.4 Summary of the MLU of the acquisition of EL1 (from Brown, 1973).......49
Table 2.5 Summary of the age of acquisition of EL1 (from Brown, 1973)................49
Table 2.6 Japanese children’s earliest verbal morphemes (from Clancy, 1985, p. 426)50
Table 2.7 Summary of the acquisition of morphology in JL1...................................52
Table 2.8 Shirai’s (1998) verb categories.................................................................58
Table 2.9 Hierarchy of processing procedures and structural outcome of English L2
(from Pienemann, 1998a, p. 9) (presented with the highest level being Stage 5)70
Table 2.10 Kawaguchi’s (2000) original hypothesised structures of Japanese...........78
Table 2.11 Revised hypothesised structures of Japanese morphology and syntax
(from Di Biase & Kawaguchi, 2002; Kawaguchi 2005a, 2005b).......................79
Table 2.12 Clahsen’s (1984) German L1 development sequence (after Pienemann,
1998b, p. 13)....................................................................................................89
Table 2.13 Overview of grammatical development in German L1 and L2 (from
Pienemann 1998b, p. 15)..................................................................................90
Table 3.1 Morphological structure predicted for each stage in each language (based
on Pienemann, 1998a: Di Biase & Kawaguchi, 2002; Kawaguchi, 2005a, 2005b)
.........................................................................................................................96
Table 3.2 The six Japanese verbal morphemes selected............................................97
Table 3.3 Hannah’s age, interlocutors, duration and activities for the analysed
Japanese sessions...........................................................................................110
Table 3.4 Hannah’s age, interlocutors, duration and activities for the analysed
English sessions.............................................................................................111
Table 3.5 Agreement rate for Japanese transcription ..............................................116
Table 3.6 Agreement rate for English transcription................................................116
Table 3.7 Summary of type, token, turn numbers in Japanese corpus.....................121
Table 3.8 Summary of type, token, turn numbers in English corpus......................121
Table 3.9 Mixed utterance in Japanese corpus........................................................123
Table 3.10 Mixed utterance in English corpus........................................................123
Table 3.11 Hannah’s age and sessions for each period ...........................................129
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Table 3.12 Coding for each period.........................................................................129
Table 3.13 Coding for cumulative period...............................................................130
Table 4.1 Rate of lexical learning (Japanese)..........................................................151
Table 4.2 Rate of lexical learning (English) ...........................................................151
Table 4.3 English preposition, determiner and conjugation appeared in each segment156
Table 4.4 Order of appearance of the nine nominal particles..................................157
Table 4.5 English personal pronouns......................................................................158
Table 4.6 Tokens of verbs with the morphemes investigate during the first period
(1J-6J)............................................................................................................165
Table 4.7 Supply* of morphemes for each session.................................................168
Table 4.8 Number of verb types for each session by morpheme type (lexical variation)
.......................................................................................................................168
Table 4.9 Summary of verb types that also appear with different morpheme (form
variation)........................................................................................................168
Table 4.10 Emergence of Japanese verbal morphology..........................................169
Table 4.11 Summary of Japanese Verbs and Their Suffixation (* = for inanimate
objects. # = for animate objects).....................................................................170
Table 4.12 Samples of Hannah’s V-te V................................................................173
Table 4.13 Supply* of V1-te V2............................................................................174
Table 4.14 Lexical variety of V1-te V2..................................................................174
Table 4.15 Emergence of V-te V............................................................................174
Table 4.16 Hannah’s benefactive utterances with oblique argument.......................178
Table 4.17 Number of tokens of dative marker.......................................................182
Table 4.18 Emergence of dative marker in benefactive structure............................182
Table 4.19 Summary of point of emergence in Japanese ........................................182
Table 4.20 Supply* of verbal morphemes in each session......................................185
Table 4.21 Verb stems used with -ed......................................................................185
Table 4.22 Verb stems used with -ing....................................................................188
Table 4.23 Summary of verb types for each session by verb forms (lexical variation)190
Table 4.24 Number of verbs that appear in other form(s) (form variation)..............190
Table 4.25 Emergence of English verbal morphology............................................190
Table 4.26 Summary of English verbs and their suffixation....................................192
Table 4.27 Samples of N-s.....................................................................................193
Table 4.28 Supply of N-s.......................................................................................195
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