Semantic Bias in Grammatical Development

Professor Yasuhiro Shirai
Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles
Department of Japanese Studies,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Abstract

In the field of first language acquisition, the role of input in grammatical development has not been given much importance. However, research on the effect of input is not very useful if we only investigate correlations between input frequency and acquisition of various grammatical structures; rather, we should look at the effect of input within a specific linguistic domain. In some recent studies in child language acquisition, it has been found that skewed distribution in the input results in highly skewed form-meaning relations in the developing grammar. This paper reviews several areas where such development has been observed: tense-aspect marking, pronominal case, conditionals, causative morphology, and relative clause constructions. The importance of this type of input-based semantic bias in grammatical development will be discussed in relation to the logical problem of language acquisition, and in particular to the role of innateness and modularity in the theory of language acquisition.