The word-order and case strategies in japanese children

Abstract

To investigate the Hayashibe’s finding on the four stages of development of perceptual strategy in sentence comprehension, two experiments were conducted. In Exp. I the card-choosing technique and NP + V sentences were used. In Exp. II the acting-out technique and NP + NP +V sentences were used. The main results were as follows: (a) Postposition strategy began to be used at the age of about four; (b) before postposition strategy there was a period of word-order strategy. The latter strategy, however, is insufficient because it can not explain the results for one-noun sentences in Exp. I. Therefore, a new complementary strategy (case strategy) was proposed. © 1980, The Japanese Psychological Association. All rights reserved.