Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study examines how cue accessibility shapes both sentence comprehension and grammatical learning in children acquiring Japanese as a first (L1) or second language (L2). Adopting a good-enough processing framework, we propose that learners rely on the most accessible cue to construct a plausible interpretation, rather than integrating all available cues. We conducted two experiments on the interpretation of transitive sentences and the acquisition of case markers. Experiment 1 showed that Chinese-native children learning Japanese as an L2 relied on word order prior to acquiring case-marker knowledge, whereas Japanese monolingual children showed no reliable word-order bias. Experiment 2 showed that argument-omitted input facilitated case-marker learning, with a stronger effect for bilingual children. We argue that when word order yields a plausible interpretation, attention to case markers is reduced, whereas its failure promotes reliance on case markers and facilitates learning.