On the acquisition of scrambling in Japanese

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental study of the acquisition of Japanese scrambling. Japanese is a free word-order language, and allows both the subjectobject- verb order and the object-subject-verb order. Harada (1977) and Saito (1985), among others, have proposed that the former is the basic order and that the latter is derived by movement of the object. We first show that children understand scrambled sentences much earlier then generally assumed, even at age 2. Then, we present evidence that those children actually have proper knowledge of the syntactic properties of scrambling. We used sentences with the anaphor zibun to test children's knowledge of the reconstruction property of scrambling. Our results show that those who were successful with the interpretation of simple scrambled sentences and the interpretation of zibun in active non-scrambled sentences showed perfect performance with scrambled sentences containing zibun. This suggests that children not only can properly interpret simple scrambled sentences, but actually know the properties of scrambling as a movement operation from a very early age.

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