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 sp...
Gespeichert in:
Hauptverfasser: | , |
---|---|
Format: | Dataset |
Sprache: | eng |
Schlagworte: | |
Online-Zugang: | Volltext bestellen |
Tags: |
Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
|
Zusammenfassung: | 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. |
---|---|
DOI: | 10.6084/m9.figshare.19593067 |