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.

本研究考察日语儿童语言中的共情动词习得现象，重点关注给予/接受类动词：age-ru、kure-ru以及mora(w)-u。这些动词的区分依据，是说话者在描述事件时所共情的句法论元角色：对于age-ru而言，说话者共情的是主语（即给予者）；对于kure-ru而言，说话者共情的是非主语论元（即接受者）；而对于mora(w)-u而言，说话者共情的是主语（即接受者）。本研究采用两种共情诊断范式——第一人称与共情位点的一致性、共情位点作为反身代词约束中的优先先行语，对4至6岁的日语儿童开展了测试。实验得到两项核心发现：其一，儿童普遍认为kure-ru的习得难度最高，这一结果与部分既往研究存在矛盾；其二，年仅4岁的部分儿童已完全掌握了这些动词的共情编码属性，即便输入语料中无法观察到说话者的共情信息。最后，本研究结合这些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。