Project 1: A large scale study on charting development in child heritage speakers of Japanese
1.1 What is our goal?
Our goal is to examine the development and change of HS grammars over time in early childhood. In doing so, we want to examine the following questions:
(1) How do the HL grammars develop overtime from middle childhood to early adolescence
(2) What variables explain and influence the development of HL grammars?
By testing over 300 heritage speakers from the ages of 6 to 18, we are able to construct a holistic picture of the developmental trajectories of HL grammars, as well as revealing predictive correlations with key experience-based variables that explain the path and continuum of HLB outcomes.
1.2 Which heritage language?
Our project will involve Japanese heritage speakers worldwide. We will work with Japanese Saturday schools and community centres in USA, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, Norway, China etc. to examine the language development in Japanese as a heritage language. As of 2019, there are over a million Japanese citizens living abroad (Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs). We will target various Japanese communities from
1.3 Which aspect(s) of language?
Classifiers: Classifiers are a grammatical system that reflect how speakers categorize objects that they count or quantify. For example, –hon is a Japanese classifier for long, thin objects such as:
ippon no enpitsu
one-CLASSIFIER MODIFIER pencil-NOM”
Case marking: In Japanese case marking, noun phrases are typically case-marked by a post-positional case marker. Case marker –ga indicates the nominative case and –o the accusative case such as:
neko-o nezumi-ga kisu-shita.
cat-ACC mouse-NOM kissed.
These two structures have shown to be particularly vulnerable in heritage language bilingualism and second language development literature, and thus we will test the knowledge/processing of these two domains of grammar by using both comprehension and production tasks.
1.4 How are we going to collect data?
Adapting to the current pandemic situation, we are collecting data online through the Gorilla platform. This will allow us to engage with a large number of Japanese heritage speakers dispersed all across the world.
See the introduction of this task in Japanese here!