This symposium was to present and discuss current studies in developmental psycholinguistics in Japan.
The organizer first gave a review of the Japanese psychological studies in language development and pointed out several problems for further research.
After illustrating his viewpoint affected by Chomsky's, Iwatate discussed Chomsky's adequacies, the 4 generative grammars with reference to one Japanese boy's utterances, and concluded that his psycho-process grammar is the most adequate so far as the present analysis is concerned. In the psycho-process grammar, the plural strata developing independently are supposed, and the combination of the restrictions of each stratum determines whether it is possible or not to generate a specific utterance.
Watamaki classified a speech into functional categories: naming, vocative, performative, descriptive, and so on. Illustrating the developmental process from one-word to combinational sentences, he found as follows: (1) Similar non-linguistic contexts and child's activities evoke speech with particular semantic function.(2) In the course of establishment of speech habit and repetition of speech, the form of expression was evolved. He asserted that this establishment of speech habit was and essential prerequisite for emergence of combinational speech.
Tanaka dealt with the development of the simple-sentence structure in Japaness children. The hypothesis was that the development could be described, other things being equal, in terms of the sentence length (the number of phrases within a sentence) and the valence of the predicate verb. This was verified by three experiments
Haga commented on the recent increase of studies based on generative semantics or case grammar and emphasized the importance of approach to language acquisition dealing with the field common to psychology and linguistics from a psychological viewpoint
Some useful ideas from the participants followed the speeches
It is expected that this symposium would give further impetus to researches in Japanese.
