ABSTRACT
This chapter presents results from some studies of first language acquisition of Japanese that converge with the linguistic results. Japanese zibun has frequently been considered an anaphor comparable to the English reflexive himself. The children's acceptance of zibun can be tested for significance against the baseline of children's acceptance of comparable sentences with null anaphora in a paradigm pronoun position. The occurrence of zibun-o in a paradigm anaphor local domain was seen to be marked in adult Japanese, and lexically sensitive in the same way as in the child. The binding theory (BT) is efficacious in first language acquisition precisely because it guides the child's lexical learning of anaphor and pronoun in his or her language. A language may or may not lexically realize this distinction in BT features. The Japanese child, presumably on the basis of the distributional evidence, is unable to accomplish a lexical characterization of zibun as either BT anaphor or BT pronoun.
