A Study about the Order of Acquiring the Japanese Demonstratives, ‘ko’, ‘so’, and ‘a’ by a Naturalistic Learner

A Focus on the Productivity in the Use of Non-Demonstrative

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether the order of acquiring Japanese non-deictic demonstratives by a naturalistic learner changes with the variation of inputs. Since previous studies of Sakoda (1998, 2001) about the acquisition order of a first language (L1) and a second language (L2) concluded that the different order of acquiring ‘ko', ‘so', and ‘a' is related to the inputs that the learner had experienced, this study predicted that "The acquisition order of nondeictic demonstratives of the naturalistic learner who did not receive input in the classroom is different from the order of classroom learner". The findings were confirmed by using the data from the Sakoda Corpus A, the three-year utterance data of a naturalistic learner of Japanese, the frequency of using the demonstratives by his interviewer and the native speakers of Basic Transcription System for Japanese(BTSJ). The result are as follows: As Sakoda (1998, 2001) pointed out, input may influence the appearance order for ‘ko', ‘so', and ‘a'. However, if the productivity in language use is considered, the acquisition order of the naturalistic learner is not different from the order of classroom learners, which likely means that there is a universal process in L2 learners' acquisition in spite of different inputs in or outside classroom.