Japanese/Korean Linguistics

This paper investigates Japanese-speaking children’s comprehension of the negative-sensitive items hitotu-mo ‘(not) even one’ and nani-mo ‘(not) anything,’ which are treated as negative concord items (Watanabe 2004). Previous studies have shown that children interpret nani-mo correctly from an early age (Sano et al. 2009), but they may have difficulty with interpreting the additive particle mo (Kurokami et al. 2021). We therefore examined whether children interpret the minimizer hitotu-mo as adults do, or misinterpret it as the numeral hitotu ‘one’ by ignoring mo. We conducted the Truth Value Judgment Task with 14 Japanese-speaking children (4;4–6;9). The results show that four- to six-year-old children comprehend both hitotu-mo and nani-mo in negative sentences in an adult-like manner.