The Acquisition of Japanese by Chinese-Japanese Bilingual Children from the Viewpoint of Error Analysis

Subjects in this study are Chinese-Japanese Bilinguals who are grown up in Japanese Language environment at home and use Chinese at school. Most of them speak fluent Japanese, but some errors are also found in their speech. OBC was conducted for eight seven-year-old Chinese- Japanese Bilingual Children in Chinese and Japanese. In this article, language data from OBC was analyzed to reveal task achievement in both languages and factors which concern to it, and also to find characteristics of errors made in their Japanese speech. In Chinese, task achievement is generally high, and children who have more opportunity to speak Japanese at home had higher achievement in their Japanese. As for errors in Japanese speech, (1) errors in verbs, particles and nouns are mostly occurred (2) most of the errors in verbs and nouns are supposedly affected by Chinese or similar words are used as substitution, and which works as strategies to compensate with lacking of their vocabularies (3) fluency, task achievement and numbers of errors seemed to have no correlation. It is observed by many parents that children who had spoken fluent Japanese in their toddler times, once they enter local elementary school,l their dominant language would shift from Japanese to Chinese. More investigation will be needed in order to find aspects of their Japanese oral proficiency as they mature.