On the comprehension of cleft constructions in child Japanese

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether Japanese-speaking children can comprehend the sentence correctly by using the information of case particles. As discussed in Otsu (1994), when the context is given, children show adult-like responses to scrambling constructions, which have been said to be difficult to comprehend. This result appears to lead us to the conclusion that children can handle the information of case particles. The question now arises: Does this hold in other cases? To settle this question, we conducted an experiment of children’s comprehension of two types of cleft constructions: Subject Cleft (Buta-san wo oshitanowa uma-san dayo. ‘It is the horse that pushed the pig’) and Object Cleft (Uma-san ga oshitanowa buta-san dayo. ‘It is the pig that the horse pushed’). In order to understand these sentences, it is necessary to use the information of the case particle attached to sentence-initial noun phrase. The following intriguing results were obtained: (i) with context, their correct responses to Subject Cleft increased up to about 90% (ii) with or without context, three and four-year-old children correctly responded to Object Cleft at a rate of about 50%. Our results suggest that children do not depend on the information of case particles when comprehending the cleft sentences