2012 Volume 53 Issue 2 Pages 144-147
In order to facilitate the acquisition of language in children with speech and language disorders, it is important to obtain basic findings on the language acquisition of typically developing children. The hypothesis has been proposed that the nominative case is licensed by the functional category "T" in Japanese. It postulates that the case marker "ga" is not produced before tense morphemes appear. However, there has been little empirical evidence to support this postulation. Moreover, it is a controversial question what is an indicator of the realization of "T" in Japanese. In this study, we focused on the appearance of the tense morphemes "ru" and "ta" and the case marker "ga". We analyzed the longitudinal speech data of seven typically developing children aged 1 to 2. The results were as follows. In all children, the case marker "ga" appeared after production of both of the tense morphemes "ru" and "ta". This finding suggests that the appearance of both "ru" and "ta" is an indicator of the realization of "T" in Japanese, and therefore, as the hypothesis above postulated, the case marker "ga" is not produced before tense morphemes appear.
