Acquisition of empathy in child Japanese

This article investigates the acquisition of empathy verbs in child Japanese, focusing on verbs of giving/receiving: age-ru ‘give,’ kure-ru ‘give,’ and mora(w)-u ‘receive.’ These verbs are distinguished by which argument the speaker empathizes with when describing an event. For age-ru ‘give,’ the speaker empathizes with the subject (the giver); for kure-ru ‘give,’ the speaker empathizes with a non-subject (the recipient), and for mora(w)-u ‘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 kure-ru 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 kure-ru poses for children in light of the potential learnability problem that these empathy verbs pose.