Japanese/Korean Linguistics

Cleft constructions have been one of the central issues in the field of child language acquisition. In order to deepen our understanding of children’s knowledge about these constructions, this study conducted a new experiment to determine whether Japanese-speaking preschool children are sensitive to the island effects in cleft constructions. The results of our experiment, which were obtained from 43 children between the ages of four and six, suggest that these children conform to the island constraints in clefts, which in turn gives prominence to the view that child language acquisition is supported by an innate faculty of language.