Assistant Professor of Japanese Masaaki Kamiya was awarded a $25,000, two-year, grant-in-aid for scientific research from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan. The primary investigator is Akemi Matsuya, Takachiho University, Japan. The title of the research is "Acquisition and Learning Processes of Negative Polarity Items and Quantifiers."
Under this grant, they will investigate how children acquire Japanese negative polarity items such as 'not - any' in English equivalent and universal quantifier such as 'every' in Japanese counterparts. The difficult thing in Japanese cases is that both negative polarity item and universal quantifier are syntactically and phonologically similar, but they are sensitive to negation. They will conduct a series of experiments to determine what clue children utilize to acquire these quantifiers.
Under this grant, they will investigate how children acquire Japanese negative polarity items such as 'not - any' in English equivalent and universal quantifier such as 'every' in Japanese counterparts. The difficult thing in Japanese cases is that both negative polarity item and universal quantifier are syntactically and phonologically similar, but they are sensitive to negation. They will conduct a series of experiments to determine what clue children utilize to acquire these quantifiers.
