Equifinality and Multifinality in Children’s Language Development

論

文

Equifinality and Multifinality in Children’s
Language Development:
A Case Study on Blind and Sighted Children

SUGIMOTO Takayo

要旨

子どもの言語獲得の過程は一様ではなくむしろ多様である。例えば語彙や構文の獲得において子どもはそれぞれ異なる発達の道筋をたどったとしても，最終的には同じ言語の体系的獲得に到達する過程が観察される。これを発達の等至性という。本研究では，子どもの二言語使用の環境への適応として，等至性とは反対の，初期は同じ特性を持ちながらも発達の過程
で 多 様 性 を 示 し 異 な る 到 達 点 に 至 る 多 径 路 性 の 発 達 事 例 に 注 目 し，Karmiloff-Smith の表象書き換え理論の枠組みで検討した。先行研究から，日本語を母語とする晴眼児（定型発達）および弱視児と先天盲の子ども
は，幼児期には共通してプロソディー情報に依存した言語処理方略を用いることが報告されている。しかし，児童期以降には，晴眼児および弱視児と，先天盲児ではそれぞれ異なる言語処理方略を発達させていくという多径路性が報告され，学習する文字特性（墨字か点字か）の影響が示唆されている。本研究では文字特性以外の影響を探るため，先行研究で対象とした幼児期から児童期中期までの晴眼児，弱視児，先天盲児の言語発達の変化を調査した。その結果，日英語バイリンガルの先天盲児は学齢期にモノ
リンガル児童とは異なる言語処理方略と語彙カテゴリーを独自に形成していることが見出された。本事例は，児童期に習得した点字の特性と，複数言語の獲得によってさらなる言語表象の書き換えが促進された結果として生じた多径路性であると考えられる。

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キーワード：言語処理，表象書き換えモデル，バイリンガル児，文字特性，発達の多径性1.

Introduction
This study investigates factors affecting both blind and sighted children’s language

development from early to middle childhood within the cognitive developmental
framework developed by Karmiloff-Smith (1996).
Children’s mastery of literacy motivates their representational redescriptions of
the word category, which, in turn, determine a developmental change and differences inlanguage processing between the blind and sighted. It is reported that compared to thesighted children, Japanese blind children show unique developmental tendencies in theirlanguage processing strategies in middle childhood after acquiring literacy (Sugimoto,2017). The fundamental mechanism behind this developmental change is that the typesof orthography learned by children, that is, the Braille alphabet alone or three types ofJapanese characters corresponding to each of the Japanese word categories, determine
the directions of their representational redescriptions. It also results in a qualitative
difference in language processing strategies between the literate blind and sighted
children. This can be seen as an example of visual deprivation leads to blind children’s
unique language development. Does orthographic knowledge alone influence children’s
language development?
We conducted experiments to investigate how both lexicon and literacy affectJapanese children’s developmental discontinuity in language processing. We examined theeffects of orthography and bilingual lexicon and attempted to explain their developmental
pathways, i.e., multfinality, in the framework of representation redescriptions (KarmiloffSmith, 1992).

1.1 Principles of Developmental Pathways (Feiring & Lewis, 1987)
Equifinality and multifinality are key principles for developmental research.
Equifinality and multifinality both describe developmental trajectory or priordevelopmental pathways. Equifinality can be seen as a number of initial, different
pathways that lead to the same outcome. On the other hand, multifinality refers to
a process where a similar initial state (e.g., levels of a behavior) results in multiple

102Equifinality and Multifinality in Children’s Language Development

pathways that lead to different outcomes. Multifinality is explored in a longitudinal
study of children assessed for attachment classifications. Similar initial conditions led todissimilar outcomes.

1.2 The Representational Redescription Model of Children’s Cognitive
Development
Karmiloff-Smith (1992)’s RR model aims to explain how children’s mental
representations become more manipulable and flexible and accessible to their own
mental state through development.
The RR model assumes four levels of representations (initial state, three external
phases) and the model incorporates a reiterative process of representational redescription.
Representational redescription is a domain-general process and not limited to linguisticknowledge. According to the RR model, development involves three recurrent phases. A
child first attends to information from external environment (phase 1). “During phase 1,
children focus on external data to create representational adjunctions” (Karmiloff-Smith,
1996: 18). Behavioral change entails but not identical to representational change in the
RR model.
In phase 2, children’s knowledge representations predominate information comingfrom the external environment. During this phase, children become accessible to internal
data and less attentive to the information coming from their external environment. Their
information processing become somewhat inflexible to control. During phase 3, children
now reconcile their internal representations and external data so that they can access toexternal information with ease.

1.3 Rendaku Processing
This paper examines children’s language development phases through their rendaku
processing strategies. Rendaku (sequential voicing) is a morpho-phonological process
in Japanese that voices the initial obstruent of the second element of a compound (Ito &Mester, 1995; Vance, 2015). This is exemplified in (1).
(1) N1+N2→N3 (Compound Word)

umi

+

kame

→

umi-game“sea”“turtle(s)”/k/ →[g]“sea turtle(s)”

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Rendaku does not apply to every word; it has constraints and irregularities concerning
lexical strata and Lyman’s Law. First, lexical strata are word categories stratified in theJapanese lexicon: Yamato (native vocabulary), Sino-Japanese (vocabulary of Chineseorigin), foreign loan words, and onomatopoeia (Ito & Mester, 1995; McCawley, 1968).
In principle, rendaku applies to words that belong to the native vocabulary (=Yamato
morphemes). Second, rendaku is subject to Lyman’s Law, which prohibits the occurrenceof more than one voiced obstruents within a morpheme (Ito & Mester, 1995; Kubozono,
1999; Lyman, 1894; Vance, 2015). Lyman’s Law is the language-specific instance of
OCP (Odden, 2011; McCarthy, 1986) and is only applicable to native words (Yamato) inJapanese. It does not apply if words in E2 already contain a voiced obstruent.
(2) Examples of application of rendaku (only endocentric compounds are given)a.

yama+sakura → yamazakura(N2=Yamato)b.

umi+ hebi → umihebi (N2=Yamato, but rendaku prohibited by Lyman’s Law)c.

niwaka+keiki → keiki (N2 = Sino-Japanese)d.

tjiizu + keiki → tjiizukeiki(N2=Foreign loan)

Rendaku also functions as a compound marker (Kageyama, 2010; Bauer, 2009: 345).
It signals the beginning of the compound head. Rendaku does not apply to coordinate
compounds (Lyman, 1894; Vance, 2015). Furthermore, rendaku has two types ofirregularity (Rosen, 2003; Vance, 2015).
Neuropsychological studies have shown that rendaku has functions of signaling
the syntactic, semantic, and morphological aspects of N2 within a compound (Ogata,
Hayashi, Imaizumi, Hirata, & Mori, 2000). Rendaku has been mainly studied based on
the data from adult speakers.
Some previous studies, either experimental or theoretical, assumed that the following
two conditions are relevant to the adult grammar of rendaku, as given in (2) (Fukuda &Fukuda, 1999; Fukuda, 2002; Kubozono, 1999: 115–122; Ito & Mester, 2001: 55).
(3) The Rendaku Conditions (Sugimoto, 2017)
It applies if (a) N2 is a Yamato morpheme (native vocabulary); and(b) N2 contains no voiced obstruent in it (Lyman’s Law)
The above rendaku conditions seem complex and difficult for preliterate children toacquire since in order to be able to apply rendaku properly, they must know the lexical104

Equifinality and Multifinality in Children’s Language Development

strata and Lyman’s Law. This means that children must be able to identify which word
belongs to the native vocabulary. How do children learn the knowledge of category
without having etymological or orthographic knowledge? In addition, how do children
learn Lyman’s Law and that it only applies to the native vocabulary?
The psychological reality of the Japanese lexicon, such as Yamato and Sino-Japanesewords, has been empirically studied in Tamaoka and Taft (2009). They examined
adult native Japanese speakers’ mental representations of Japanese lexical strata byusing Kanji1 reading experiments. They have concluded that Japanese speakers’ Kanjilexicon consists of sublexica, one for On-reading, and the other for Kun-reading, which
respectively corresponds to Yamato and Sino-Japanese. They added that Kanji provides
a base for constructing Japanese speakers’ sublexica. Their findings suggest that there
is a distinction or boundary between native words and Sino-Japanese words in the adultlexicon.

1.4 Children’s Acquisition of Rendaku
Rendaku acquisition studies have assumed that children learn the adult’s rendaku
conditions (Fukuda & Fukuda, 1999; Fukuda, 2002). However, recent psycholinguistic
studies have revealed that children do not acquire rendaku along with the adult’s grammar.
Instead, Japanese-speaking preschoolers develop a prosodically-based rendaku strategy(preschooler-specific rendaku strategy, Sugimoto, 2013b). The preschooler-specificrendaku strategy is also observed in English-Japanese simultaneous bilinguals. Sugimoto(2017) reported that preliterate blind children also show the preschooler-specific rendaku
strategy.
(4) Preschooler-specific Rendaku Strategy based on the pitch accent (Sugimoto, 2013&2017) Apply rendaku if N2 is an unaccented word.
Why do children attend to prosodic information instead of adult grammar of
rendaku? Japanese is a language with a pitch accent system. Pitch accent is a prosodic
feature of a word and it differentiates the meaning of each Japanese word. Pitch accent
can be divided into two types: Accented and unaccented. Accented words have a tonalrise followed by a sudden fall. Unaccented words have no such a tonal (rise & fall)contour. Japanese-speaking adults and children do rely on pitch accent in their compoundprocessing (Hirose & Mazuka, 2017).

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Preschooler-specific rendaku processing reflects the distribution of pitch accent
types of native vocabulary, to which rendaku applies. Descriptive studies show reportsthat approximately 71% of Yamato words (native vocabulary) are unaccented whilemore than 90% of loan words are accented with the pitch rise on their antepenult moras(Kubozono, 2006: 180). On the other hand, Sino-Japanese words cannot be characterizedwith respect to pitch accent: 49% of Sino-Japanese words have the antepenult accent
while 51% are unaccented.
Children are aware that rendaku does not apply every word; it applies a particular
category of words. They actively construct their own Rendaku rule, making best use of
their knowledge: Apply rendaku if N2 is an unaccented native word. This preschoolerspecific rendaku strategy can be interpreted as children’s attention bias, which allows
them to categorize Japanese lexicon based on the prosodic features alone. Children’s
attention bias enables them to learn language quite easily (Jusczyk, 1988; KarmiloffSmith, 1992).
The sighted preschoolers’ first learn the prosodically-based rendaku processing
strategy: If N2 of a given compound is unaccented, then apply rendaku. A developmental
change from preschooler-specific to adult-like rendaku processing in middle childhood.
The correspondence between Japanese lexical strata and its orthography may direct
children’s redefinition of rendaku (Sugimoto, 2016b).

Figure 1 Children’s Redefinition of the Rendaku Word Category for the sighted

1.4.1 Literacy and Representational Redescriptions in Blind Children
It is also reported that Japanese blind children show unique developmental tendencies
in their language processing strategies in middle childhood after acquiring literacy

106Equifinality and Multifinality in Children’s Language Development(Sugimoto, 2017). The fundamental mechanism behind this developmental change isthat the types of orthography learned by children, that is, the Braille alphabet aloneor three types of Japanese characters corresponding to each of the Japanese word
categories, determine the directions of their representational redescriptions. This also
results in a qualitative difference in language processing strategies between the literate
blind and sighted children. Does orthographic knowledge alone influence children’s
language development? Children’s mastery of literacy motivates their representational
redescriptions of the word category, which, in turn, determine a developmental change
and differences in language processing between the blind and sighted (Sugimoto, 2017).
Preliterate preschoolers with, both the blind and the sighted, showed prosodically-based
rendaku processing; after acquiring literacy they showed adult-like rendaku processing.
Blind children showed a developmental change in rendaku processing after acquiring
literacy in Braille. Both literate blind children (with Braille alphabetic knowledge) andliterate blind adults showed overgeneralizations of rendaku processing.
Literacy motivates children’s redefinition of rendaku (a→b→c) Literacy development
based on different orthographic systems (Kana or Braille) and different redefinitionsof the rendaku word category emerge, which result in distinctive rendaku-processing
strategies between the blind and the sighted.

1.4.2 Rendaku Processing and the Bilingual Lexicon: Effects of Two Language
Systems
How does bilingualism affect the developing lexicons and language processing ofchildren? The preschooler-specific rendaku strategy is also observed in English-Japanese
simultaneous bilinguals (Sugimoto, 2016a). They show the preschooler-specific rendaku
processing just like monolingual Japanese-speaking children do; they change to show theadult-like rendaku after acquiring literacy.
How does acquiring two languages affect the developing lexicons and language
processing of children? This study investigates bilingual children’s language developmentfrom early to middle childhood in comparison with that of monolingual children.
Children’s mastery of literacy motivates their representational redescriptions of theword category, which, in turn, determine a developmental change and differences inlanguage processing between the blind and sighted. It is reported that Japanese blind

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No. 41children show unique developmental tendencies in their language processing strategies in
middle childhood after acquiring literacy (Sugimoto, 2017). The fundamental mechanism
behind this developmental change is that the types of orthography learned by children,that is, the Braille alphabet alone or three types of Japanese characters corresponding toeach of the Japanese word categories, determine the directions of their representational
redescriptions. This also results in a qualitative difference in language processing
strategies between the literate blind and sighted children. Does orthographic knowledge
alone influence children’s language development?
Through longitudinal experiments, we investigated how monolingual and bilingual
blind children develop their lexicon and language-processing skills with respect tosighted and blind children. Our experiments used compound noun production tasks
to investigate the developmental change in Japanese-specific rendaku processing andchildren’s definitions of the Japanese word category in the lexicon. For blind children, wedeveloped a set of experimental stimuli using raised pictures.
The study comprised 97 typically developing children (the sighted), 3 congenital
blinds, and 3 children with severe visual disorder (low vision) as participants. They hadmeasured their developmental changes for three years. They analyzed children’s language
production in compound noun formation and acoustically compared the language-specificrendaku processing patterns of monolingual/bilingual and sighted/blind children before
and after acquiring literacy (Japanese kana characters for the sighted and Braille for theblind). Their results demonstrated that unlike monolingual blind children, the EnglishJapanese bilingual blind showed no overapplication of rendaku processing to foreign
loanwords but its overapplication to Sino-Japanese words (vocabulary of Chinese origin).
These results suggest that acquiring proficiency in more than one language enables blindchildren to restructure the lexicon and create a new lexical boundary, which is not likely
for monolingual blind children.
(5) The results from previous studies summarized (Sugimoto, 2017)
1. Preliterate preschoolers with, both the blind and the sighted, showed prosodicallybased rendaku processing; after acquiring literacy they showed adult-like
rendaku processing.
2. Blind children showed a developmental change in rendaku processing after
acquiring literacy in Braille.

108Equifinality and Multifinality in Children’s Language Development

3. Both literate blind children (with Braille alphabetic knowledge) and literate
blind adults showed overgeneralizations of rendaku processing.

Figure 2

Rendaku processing patterns (reproduced based on the data from Sugimoto, 2017)

Both blind and sighted children attend to prosodic information of language since itis the only accessible source of information. Then as they grow up, children develop theirown literacy based on different orthographic systems (Kana & Chinese characters or
Braille alone). Children’s internal knowledge may differ, depending on the orthographic
system they learn. Different types of internal knowledge motivates different redefinitionsof the rendaku word category. For the blind children, who have learned Braille alphabet,the lexical distinction such as Yamato, SJ or loan words made by the Kana orthography is
not accessible. This may result in distinctive rendaku-processing strategies between theblind and the sighted.

1.5

Research Aims
Through longitudinal experiments, we investigated how monolingual and bilingual

blind children develop their lexicon and language-processing skills with respect tosighted and blind children.
Does literacy alone affect the redefinition of the rendaku category? Can children’s
acquisition of two languages affect their definition of it? How does the bilingual lexicon
affect blind children’s language development? If the bilingual lexicon directly influence
either children’s representation or processing, then monolinguals and bilinguals will
have different definitions of the rendaku word category. If acquiring more than one
language motivates representational redescriptions and determines rendaku processing,then bilingual children should show the similar overgeneralization of rendaku processing

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like monolinguals do.

2.

Methods
Our experiments used compound noun production tasks (Nicoladis, 2003; Sugimoto,2016a&b) to investigate the developmental change in Japanese-specific rendaku
processing (Vance, 2016) and children’s definitions of the Japanese word category in thelexicon. The experiment was cross-sectional and had 3(lexical strata)*4(group). Children
with typical development show preschooler-specific rendaku processing in the earlychildhood but their strategy changes after the middle childhood.
Our experiments used compound noun production tasks (Sugimoto, 2016a) withnew linguistic stimuli added. Our participants comprised 3 congenital blinds (M= 62mo.;
SD: 6.01; range: 57–71mo.) and 2 children with low vision (M: 72.5 mo.; SD: 1.5; range:
71–74 mo.), and 12 typically developing six-year olds: M=79.3 mo., SD=2.23).
As for the stimuli of the compound noun formation task, we used three types oflexical strata for N2: Yamato (e.g., ‘kuruma’ (=car)’, ‘sakura’ (=cherry blossom), etc.),
Sino-Japanese (e.g., ‘hikouki’ (=airplane), ‘kyouryuu’(=diansaur), etc.) and English loans(‘piano’, ‘tiishatsu’ (=t-shirt), etc.). We used ‘himawari (=sunflower)’ for N1 throughout
the trials (Sugimoto, 2016a).
Children were tested individually in a quiet room. We went through three trials: 4
warm-up trials, 4 comprehension trials, and finally the 20 test trials (N1=hima’wari).
Typically-developing children were shown three types of pictures on a PC in a random
order and were asked to name the third pictures (compound nouns). For blind children,
we used sets of experimental stimuli using raised pictures (stickers). We used a SONY IC
recorder (ICD SX-1000) and recorded the children’s utterances in the experiment. Twopeople, one of whom was the author, listened separately to the recordings and transcribed
them, judging whether or not the children voiced the target consonant (κ =.97).

3.

Results and Discussion
We analyzed children’s language production in compound noun formation andcompared the language-specific rendaku processing patterns of monolingual/bilingualand sighted/blind children before and after acquiring literacy (Japanese kana characters110Equifinality and Multifinality in Children’s Language Development

for the sighted and Braille for the blind).
Since all typically developing children and adults in the control group applied all
and only rendaku to the target compounds, we now focus on the blind children and thechildren with low vision.
Our results demonstrated that after acquiring literacy, all the blind children showed
overapplications of rendaku to non-native words. However, only the English-Japanesebilingual blind child showed a distinctive rendaku-processing strategy from earlychildhood through middle childhood. That is, unlike monolingual blind children, thebilingual blind showed a minimal overapplication of rendaku to English loanwords but
its overapplication to Sino-Japanese words (vocabulary of Chinese origin; Figure 2). His
overapplication of rendaku to Sino-Japanese words was not significantly different frommonolingual blinds (z=.02). However, his overapplication of rendaku to English loan
words was minimal and different from other monolingual blinds (z=2.02). These results
suggest that acquiring proficiency in more than one language enables blind children
to restructure the lexicon and create a new lexical boundary, which is not likely formonolingual blind children.
A (Blingual
Blind)
10

5

B (Monolingual
Blind)5

C (Monolingual
D (Low Vision)
Blind)
45

4

E (Low Vision)
3

0

0

0

0
–5

–1
–4

–5

–10
Native Words

Figure 3

–1

–2
–5 –5
Sino-JapaneseEnglish Loan Words

Overgeneralizations of Rendaku to Non-native Words by Blind Children(5pts. Max)

(The negative values in the Sino-Japanese and English loan word conditions indicate
overgeneralizations of rendaku)

Our results demonstrated that unlike monolingual blind children, the EnglishJapanese bilingual blind showed no overapplication of rendaku processing to foreign
loanwords but its overapplication to Sino-Japanese words. These results suggest that
acquiring proficiency in more than one language enables blind children to restructure
the lexicon and create a new lexical boundary, which is not likely for monolingual blind

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All blind children overgeneralized the rendaku rule to nonnative Sino-Japanese
vocabulary. But the bilingual blind child did not overgeneralize it to the words of English
origin. We can conclude that the bilingual blind obtained the lexical distinction between
loan words which allowed him to distinguish the loan words of English origin from otherloan words. By the time of the experiment, his bilingual lexicon had become unique anddifferent from monolingual blinds or sighted bilinguals (Figure 3).

Figure 44.

Bilingual lexicon and its effects on RR and processing

Conclusion
In conclusion, we have seen that the RRs model accounts for the example ofmultifinality of language development introduced in this paper. Unlike monolingual
blind children, the English-Japanese bilingual did not overapply English words
differently; but he overapplied rendaku to Sino-Japanese words just like monolingual
blinds. The child’s acquisition of bilingual lexicon motivated the child’s representational
redescription, which in turn affected his language processing of rendaku. This supports
the basic principle of the RR model that children’s representational redescription takes
place through the acquisition of cognitive skills and knowledge through new learning.
Children can flexibly change their representation in their original way in accordance with
their linguistic environment. Both orthographic features and languages children learn
determine their rendaku processing strategies, which result in multifinality observed inchildren’s language development.

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Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank all the participants of this study. An earlier version of this paper
was presented at the Aichi University Gengo Danwakai (the Linguistic Colloquium) held in June,
2017. This research was financially supported in part by JSPS KAKENHI (#17K02764) granted to theauthor.

Note
1Kanji is one of the three types of Japanese orthography. It is a set of Chinese characters withbasically two distinctive ways of reading: On-reading and Kun-reading.

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