In a body of empirical research, it has been observed that young children from across different linguistic communities adhered to a particular type of nonadult interpretation of disjunction: They appear to interpret disjunction conjunctively. Through three experiments with Japanese-speaking preschoolers, we investigate the source of this nonadult…

This dissertation developed a new learner corpus of Japanese and introduced an error and linguistic annotation scheme specifically designed for Japanese particles. The corpus contains texts written by learners who are in the first year to fourth year university level Japanese courses. The texts in the corpus were tagged with part-of-speech and…

When acquiring a second language, learners must become able to perceive the difference between novel sounds ("discrimination") and also associate strings of sounds with distinct vocabulary items ("lexical encoding"). Recent research has questioned whether discrimination is a sufficient or necessary condition for encoding, and…

While acquiring a second language, learners may encounter challenges and difficulties in effectively carrying out verbal communication in the second language. Mastering the apology speech act is a challenge for L2 learners. The objective of this study is to identify the apology strategies utilized by individuals learning the Japanese language, as…

The so-called syllable position effect in speech errors has been interpreted as reflecting constraints posed by the frame structure of a given language, which is separately operating from linguistic content during speech production. The effect refers to the phenomenon that when a speech error occurs, replaced and replacing sounds tend to be in the…

This study tested the claim of input-based accounts of language acquisition that children's inflectional errors reflect competition between different forms of the same verb in memory. In order to distinguish this claim from the claim that inflectional errors reflect the use of a morphosyntactic default, we focused on the Japanese verb system,…

Although the Japanese reflexive "zibun" can be bound both locally and across clause boundaries, the third-person pronoun "kare" cannot take a local antecedent. These are properties that children need to learn about their language, but we show that the direct evidence of the binding possibilities of "zibun" is sparse…

Laufer (1988) introduced the concept of synform errors, where second language (L2) learners confuse a word for a different but similar looking or sounding L2 word. Stubbe and Cochrane (2016) reported that of 1,187 commonly repeated errors on a Japanese to English non-contextual translation test, 461 were synform errors (39%). This study introduces…

Research on agrammatism has revealed that the nature of linguistic impairment is systematic and interpretable. Non-canonical sentences are more impaired than those of canonical sentences. Previous studies on Japanese (Hiroshi et al. 2004; Chujo 1983; Tamaoka et al. 2003; Nakayama 1995) report that aphasic patients take longer Response Time (RT)…

We are expected to behave appropriately to suit social situations. One form of behavioral control is the selection of a linguistic register that is appropriate to the listener. Register selection errors can sometimes be interpreted as rude behavior and result in having a bad influence on the relationship with the listener and the evaluation by…

This study focused on the grammatical accuracy of Japanese students who were learning English. The database for the errors came from the Japanese University Student Corpus (JUSC) comprising 61 transcripts containing 51,061 words. An inventory, containing 400 errors in context, was taken from this corpus. The first research question related to the…

This article contends that the profile of a foreign language learner can contain valuable information about possible problems they will face during the learning process, and could be used to help personalize feedback. A particularly important attribute of a foreign language learner is their native language background as it defines their known…

This article studies the use of support verb constructions (SVCs) in the written production of learners of Spanish. SVCs are lexical combinations whose content is similar to verbal predicates but is distributed between a verb and a noun, the noun being the carrier of the core lexical meaning of the predicate. Although there is considerable…

The study anchors on the Linguistic research tradition of Error Analysis (EA), focused on the grammatical errors, specifically on "verb tenses" manifested in the sentences of Japanese ESL learners. The entire respondent population was drawn from the pool of registered learners in 2017 at the Clark Institute of the Philippines Foundation,…

A list number recall test in English (L2) was administered to both Japanese (L1) students with beginning-level English proficiency who attended evening high school and Japanese college students with intermediate-level English proficiency. The major findings were that, only for the high school group, the small numbers 1 and 2 in middle positions of…