Volume 46, Issue 1

This paper reports on an experiment which examined the knowledge of verb placement by Japanese learners of English (JLEs). The results of two grammaticality judgement tasks indicated that JLEs acquire the unavailability of an NP-shift operation relatively early, but their judgements of sentences involving V-raising (i.e., illicit *SV-Adv-O word order) was indecisive up to the Intermediate level, and this seemed to improve at the Advanced level. On the other hand, the results of a sentence matching task showed that no JLE group clearly differentiated the +/-V-raising word orders in terms of their matching speed for both the present and the past tense contexts. The results are interpreted to indicate the possibility that JLEs can learn the overt word order facts, but never end up with the same grammatical representation of V-raising parameter as native speakers. This supports the hypotheses arguing for impairment of grammatical features in second language acquisition.

The acquisition of Japanese conditionals is regarded as one of the most complicated items for foreign learners of Japanese to acquire. However, when it comes to account for this fact, there is no ready answer. By focusing on the acquisition of conditionals by Norwegian learners of Japanese, this study discusses whether modal constraints on the use of Japanese conditional markers can account for learners' difficulty and whether such difficulty can be systematically predicted by applying an implicational markedness relationship framework. In the course of the argument, a universal implicational markedness hierarchy for modal constraints on conditional markers is proposed. The hypothesis suggests that relative degrees of learning difficulty for the Norwegian learners will be determined by differences in degree of markedness between the native language and Japanese on the implicational hierarchy. Experimental results provide significant evidence to support that this is the case.

This study examined Japanese speakers' learning of American English during their first years of immersion in the United States (U.S.). Native Japanese-speaking (NJ) children (n=16) and adults (n=16) were tested on two occasions, averaging 0.5 (T1) and 1.6 years (T2) after arrival in the U.S. Age-matched groups of native English-speaking children (n=16) and adults (n=16) also participated. The NJ adults' scores for segmental perception and production were higher than the NJ children's at T1. The NJ children's foreign accent scores and pronunciation of English fricatives improved significantly between T1 and T2, whereas the NJ adults' scores did not. These findings suggest that adults may have an advantage over children initially but that children may improve in production more quickly than adults when immersed in an L2-speaking environment.