Philip levine and ron scollon, editors

Part I: Language Processing and First-Language Learning
Table 3.4.
Number of challenge types addressed to participants
Challenge type
Three-year-olds
Four-year-olds
Counter-assertion
40
51
Alternative suggestion
124
129
Request for confirmation
248
312
Why-question
230
219
Request for action
10
14
Total
652
725
Table 3.5.
Types of children’s responses to adult challenges
Response
type
Coded example
Datte
A:
Kujira-san no shippo kana?
“Could it be whale’s tail?”
C:
Datte, kujirasan ne shippo wa haato ni natteru no.
“But/because a whale’s
tail is heart-shaped.”
Explanation A:
Kore sa kirin-san janai?
“Isn’t this a giraffe?”
C:
Chiaguyo. Kirinsan wa butsubutsu ni natteru
. “No. Giraffes have a spotted
pattern.”
Reiteration C:
Sakkaa booru.
“Its’s a soccer ball.”
A:
Doushite korega sakkaa booru nano?
“Why is it a soccer ball?”
C:
Sakaa booru
. “It’s a soccer ball.”
Yes/no
C:
Zousan no ohana
. “It’s an elephant’s trunk.”
A:
Honto?
“Really?”
C:
Un
. “Yeah.”
Revision
C:
Jitensha
. “It’s a bike.”
A:
Jitensha? Honto?
“A bike? Really?”
C:
Baiku.
“It’s a motorcycle.”
Other
A:
Doushite kore kumasan?
“Why is this a bear?”
C: . . .
Content made available by Georgetown University Press, DigitalGeorgetown, 
and the Department of Linguistics.

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than “other” types of responses when some defense of a position presumably is called
for. Some evidence for this claim is presented in table 3.6, which indicates that more
four-year-olds than three-year-olds offer explanations in the face of challenges.
Table 3.7 shows the number of
datte
utterances produced by the children, ac-
cording to the types of challenges to which they were responding. Most of the
datte
utterances produced by the children came in response to why-questions. Requests for
confirmation also elicited a small number of
datte
utterances, whereas counter-
assertions and alternative suggestions elicited almost no
datte
utterances.
To address the possible objection that the children were only providing
datte
in a
nonthinking, formulaic way, and to address our fourth hypothesis, we looked at what
kinds of information the children provided after their
datte
utterances. We coded this
information into five categories: appropriate explanation; repetition;
datte
-alone; in-
appropriate explanation; and unclear. Table 3.8 shows examples of these categories
(except the last one).
Table 3.9 presents the coded results of this analysis. Although there is a clear in-
crease in the ratio of appropriate explanations following
datte
use from the
three-year-old group to the four-year-old group, even the three-year-olds provided
appropriate explanations following their uses of
datte
about 64 percent of the time—
JAPANESE CHILDREN’S USE OF
DATTE (BUT-BECAUSE) AND THEIR DEVELOPING THEORIES OF MIND
45
Table 3.6.
Number of response types addressed to challenges
Response type
Three-year-olds
Four-year-olds
Datte
55
79
Explanation
129
181
Reiteration
105
97
Yes/no
154
233
Revision
58
62
Other
151
73
Total
652
725
Table 3.7.
Number of
datte-utterances produced according to types of challenges
Challenge type
Three-year-olds
Four-year-olds
Counter-assertion
1
2
Alternative suggestion
2
5
Request for confirmation
9
12
Why-question
43
59
Request for action
0
1
Total
55
79
Content made available by Georgetown University Press, DigitalGeorgetown, 
and the Department of Linguistics.

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suggesting that they were aware that some justification of their previous statements
was called for.