Production of Case Markers by JSL Children Born/Raised in Japan

How JSL Childrenʼs Performance Differs from Monolingual Children

Abstract

In this study, 427 monolingual children and 122 JSL (Japanese as a Second Language) children in the fourth to sixth grades completed a picture-guided paper-and-pencil test that was developed to assess their ability to produce four types of case markers: ga, o, ni, and de. The test consisted of 73 items intended to tap productive knowledge of the polysemous case markers in question. Some of the items were scrambled sentences. Quantitative analyses revealed statistically significant differences in total scores between the monolingual and JSL groups. There were two to five times as many JSL children as monolingual children in the lowest-scoring group. A close examination revealed that a prominent difference between the JSL and monolingual groups can be found with the scrambled items that included two animate nouns and the combinations of nominative ga and accusative o or nominative ga and dative ni. Although these items were challenging for both JSL and monolingual children, the JSL groupʼs performance suffered to a greater extent.