Is "default" harder to comprehend?

[Hiromi Sumiya]

Dear all,

We have started looking at the acquisition of six Japanese numeral classifiers, ri/nin (for counting humans), hiki (small animals), dai (land vehicles and machines), hon (1D long objects), mai (2D flat objects) and ko (3D small objects), with 2 to 4 year old children in a forced-choice comprehension task.  After a pilot experiment, one thing that became clear is that the perfomance of 'ko' is very poor among these children.  

On the other hand, what seems puzzling is that the production of 'ko' is one of the first classifiers to appear in young children.  In addition, it has been said that 'ko' is becoming to be another 'default' classifier (beside 'tsu') in the younger generation.

We would really appreciate if anyone can direct us to any studies and literaure that will help understand this kind of dissociation in acquisition between the early production and later comprehension.

Thank you very much in advance.

Hiromi Sumiya
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