The effects of input on a Japanese-English bilingual's acquisition of Japanese particles

This study attempts to establish the relationship between the input data of a Japanese mother and the output data of an English-Japanese bilingual child by investigating the subjects' use of Japanese particles. The participants in this study were a bilingual child and her Japanese mother who were living in Australia. The data was collected from natural conversations between mother and child which were tape-recorded every four weeks when the child was between the ages of 5;01 and 6;08. Previous studies in child language acquisition suggest that a child's production of particles may be directly correlated to the mother's input. If the hypothesis that children's utterances are modeled on input from their parents is correct, then the child in this study should have particle usage patterns that are similar to her mother's. Although the data in this study does show strong correlations between the mother's input and the child's output, it reveals that parental input was not the only influence on the output of the child's Japanese. It was found that the child did not simply mimic the patterns of her mother; some of her particle usages were different from her mother's, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Moreover, the child used avoidance strategies such as omitting a particle or substituting a different particle in order to get around having to use particles that she had not fully acquired. The differences between the child's particle usage and her mother's appeared to be the result of a lack of input variation rather than her bilinguality, since she had learned Japanese mostly from conversations with her mother, in contrast to monolingual Japanese children, who have a greater variety of input sources.