Acquisition of empathy in child Japanese

This article investigates the acquisition of empathy verbs in child Japanese, focusing on verbs of giving/receiving: <i>age-ru</i> ‘give,’ <i>kure-ru</i> ‘give,’ and <i>mora(w)-u</i> ‘receive.’ These verbs are distinguished by which argument the speaker empathizes with when describing an event. For <i>age-ru</i> ‘give,’ the speaker empathizes with the subject (the giver); for <i>kure-ru</i> ‘give,’ the speaker empathizes with a non-subject (the recipient), and for <i>mora(w)-u ‘</i>receive,’ the speaker empathizes with the subject (the recipient). Using two diagnostics for empathy (alignment of first person with empathy loci; empathy loci being preferred antecedents in reflexive binding), 4- to 6-year-old children were tested. Our experiments show the following two findings: (i) children found <i>kure-ru</i> as most challenging, partially contradicting previous research; (ii) some children as young as age 4 have fully acquired the empathy-encoding properties of these verbs despite the speaker’s empathy being unobservable in the input. We discuss the challenges that <i>kure-ru</i> poses for children in light of the potential learnability problem that these empathy verbs pose.