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.本文针对日语儿童语言中的共情动词习得展开研究，重点聚焦于授受类动词：age-ru（意为‘给予’）、kure-ru（意为‘给予’）以及mora(w)-u（意为‘接受’）。上述三类动词的区分依据，为说话者在描述某一事件时所共情的论元角色。以age-ru为例，说话者会共情于主语（即给予者）；对于kure-ru而言，说话者共情的对象并非主语，而是受事（接受者）；而mora(w)-u则对应说话者共情于主语（即接受者）。本研究采用两项共情诊断标准（即第一人称与共情位点的一致性、共情位点在反身代词约束中作为优先先行语），对4至6岁的儿童开展测试。本实验得到两项核心发现：其一，儿童普遍认为kure-ru是三类动词中最难掌握的，这一结果与部分既往研究存在矛盾；其二，即便输入语料中无法观察到说话者的共情行为，年仅4岁的部分儿童已完全掌握了这类动词的共情编码属性。最后，本文结合这类共情动词所带来的潜在可学习性问题，探讨了kure-ru给儿童习得带来的挑战。