Abstract
One of the problems in corpus-based Japanese linguistics is a shortage of shared linguistic corpus written by Japanese children. Written language corpus of Japanese children shared as language resources would enable us to analyze a change of the Japanese use according to age or examine words and grammatical style characteristically used by children. Such corpus would be expected to contribute to a Japanese study or Japanese education as well as related fields such as cognitive development and sociology. Therefore, in this study we collected essays written by Japanese elementary school children shown in Websites of 265 elementary schools. As a result we collected 10,006 texts, about 1.23 million words. Using date collected through this process, we investigated how children in each school year used mimetic words. Results showed that the amount of mimetic expressions rose to a third grader, the kinds of onomatopoeic expressions increased to a second grader, and then they were dropping. Furthermore, as a sociologically applied study, we investigated what children wrote about their parents and how they reacted to the exchanges with parents. Result showed that the reaction of a child was rich and strong in the case of mother.
