IJS Lecture: Nozomi Tanaka, "Subject Advantage in the Acquisition of Relative Clauses: The Case of Japanese"

The Institute for Japanese Studies presents:

"Subject Advantage in the Acquisition of Relative Clauses: The Case of Japanese"

Nozomi Tanaka
Indiana University

Abstract: It is attested in many languages (e.g., English, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Korean) that children acquire subject relative clauses (RCs) (e.g., 男の子を追っかけてる女の子 ‘the girl that is chasing the boy’) earlier than object RCs (e.g., 男の子が追っかけてる女の子 ‘the girl that the boy is chasing’). This is called the “subject advantage” in relative clauses. Findings on Japanese RCs, however, have been mixed. While some studies have found a subject advantage, others report no asymmetry or even an object advantage. In this talk, I will present preliminary findings from our work with Japanese-speaking children and discuss how research on Japanese can contribute to the investigation of this phenomenon.

Nozomi Tanaka is an assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University. She received her PhD in linguistics from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She specializes in experimental linguistics, language acquisition, and language loss, and has worked on various languages of Asia and the Pacific, including Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Tagalog, and Yoron-Ryukyuan.