The term risk factor includes surrogates for underlying causes. However, a risk factor is not necessarily a cause.
For intentionality, with familiar verbs both Japanese and English speakers selected fewer transitive sentences for accidental than intentional scenes, but this pattern was more pronounced in Japanese speakers. However, with novel verbs, English and Japanese three-year-olds were influenced by patient animacy, but in contrasting ways which mirror aspects of their linguistic input. We found no effect of patient animacy on sentence selection with familiar verbs at any age in either language. Participants watched animations (Study 1) or videos (Study 2) depicting familiar and novel causal actions, and made a best-match choice between a transitive and intransitive description. We studied two factors suggested to influence this choice: Animacy (Study 1) and Intentionality (Study 2). In a comprehension task, we investigated the emergence of sentence preferences to describe causal events in English- and Japanese-speaking children (aged three and five years) and compared this to preferences displayed by adults. Using the 14 comparable causative alternation verbs identified from our corpus study, we conducted three experimental studies. In addition, animacy of patients seemed not to determine the choice of transitive/intransitive constructions by Japanese and English caregivers. Children at around age 3 learned usage from their caregivers, and had already started showing language-specific patterns. Our results show that Japanese adults and children tended to produce more intransitive constructions than English adults and children. The proportion of transitive usage ("transitivity bias") was calculated and 14 verbs were selected to directly compare between Japanese and English. Further, we investigated the relationship of animacy of agent and patient to the choice of causative alternation sentences (transitives or intransitives). In the corpus study, we examined the relative use of transitive/intransitive sentences of causative alternation verbs in child-directed speech and children's speech (around age 3) in English and Japanese. To answer these questions, a corpus study and three experimental studies were conducted. This thesis presents an attempt to investigate whether there is a difference between English and Japanese people in how they map form to meaning how these form-meaning mappings are learned what is the relative influence of cognitive-general bias and language-specific input on children's developing linguistic representation and whether transfer effects of syntactic or form-meaning mapping in Japanese-English bilingual speakers are observed. Little is known about how these preferences emerge and the relative influence of cognitive biases and language-specific input at different stages in development.
Languages differ in how they encode causal events, placing greater or lesser emphasis on the agent or patient of the action.