Today, we invited Mr. Thomas Hun-tak Lee, a professor from Hong Kong, to give us a lecture about logical structures in early child language. To put it more simply, it was about how children comprehend, step by step, grammar and logical structures of their mother tongue. Before stepping into the subject, Mr. Lee talked about the complexity of human language by presenting interesting facts such as, how a single sentence could imply two messages, one a presupposition and the other an assertion. He used quite a few technical terms, and therefore while the professors were nodding their heads, which seemed to indicate that they understood everything without much difficulty, many of the student participants were seen getting help from their dictionary to keep up with the lecture. In the main part, he had a lot more to share with us. Surprisingly, children in English speaking environments can understand the difference between the two articles: "a" and "the" by the age of four. It is often said in Japan, that it takes three years to manage English prepositions, eight years for articles. Mr. Lee also gave an example of how children and adults are likely to interpret the same sentence in different ways according to whether they were capable of understanding the difference between "all" and "every". I think the participants were very active in today's lecture, responding to Professor Lee by giving their own opinion not only at the end of the lecture, but in the middle of it, which does not happen at every event. And for that, we must thank the GP professors for raising many questions themselves and creating a comfortable atmosphere for the students.

by Rina M