This psycholinguistic project will be carried out as a dissertation project in Japan and the USA. It will experimentally test native speakers of Japanese and English to see if there are differences in how spoken sentences are parsed for internal structure and how sentence structure is acquired by children learning their first language. Both children and adults will be tested in order to address current issues regarding the interaction of processing strategies and first-language acquisition. Japanese and English provide a good pair for such testing, since they are typologically very different sorts of languages.
