Acquiring the unobservable: empathy verbs, belief verbs, and long-distance binding of zibun 'self' in child Japanese
| dc.contributor.advisor | Deen, Kamil | |
| dc.contributor.author | Ohba, Akari | |
| dc.contributor.department | Linguistics | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-07-02T23:42:39Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2024-07-02T23:42:39Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024 | |
| dc.description.degree | Ph.D. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10125/108401 | |
| dc.subject | Linguistics | |
| dc.subject | belief verbs | |
| dc.subject | empathy verbs | |
| dc.subject | first language acquisition | |
| dc.subject | learnability problem | |
| dc.subject | long-distance binding | |
| dc.subject | syntactic bootstrapping | |
| dc.title | Acquiring the unobservable: empathy verbs, belief verbs, and long-distance binding of zibun 'self' in child Japanese | |
| dc.type | Thesis | |
| dcterms.abstract | One of the fundamental questions in the field of language acquisition is a learnability problem, which considers how learners acquire certain aspects of language which are not directly provided in the input or whose referents are not readily observable in the world. This dissertation investigates Japanese children’s acquisition of various linguistic phenomena, each posing a learnability challenge due to either the absence of direct evidence or the unobservability of the referent in the world. The first focus is on the acquisition of verbs referring to mental states and those encoding a speaker's empathy. Verbs that refer to mental states (e.g., 'think') present a particular challenge as their referents, being internal mental states, are not unobservable. Similarly, empathy verbs in Japanese, reflecting the speaker’s mental closeness to a certain discourse referent, also present a potential learnability challenge. Empathy verbs encode speaker’s empathy to specific discourse referents, such as verbs of giving and receiving in Japanese (ageru ‘give,’ kureru ‘give,’ and morau ‘receive’). Importantly, which empathy verb to use depends on which discourse referent the speaker empathizes with (feels closer to). Empathy verbs present a particular challenge for learners because which discourse referent the speaker empathizes with is determined in the speaker’s mind, which is unobservable from outside. Moreover, the two verbs of giving, ageru ‘give’ and kureru ‘give’ have the same subcategorization frame (the same argument structure). Therefore, the verbs ageru and kureru look like synonyms. The second focus is on the fact that both mental verbs and empathy verbs license long-distance binding of the Japanese reflexive zibun ‘self.’ Previous research argued that Japanese children are hardly exposed to zibun ‘self’ referring to a long-distance antecedent. This poses a serious learnability challenge for children: How do children (come to) know that zibun can refer to long-distance antecedents, even if there is almost no evidence in the input? Moreover, it has been reported that children generally have difficulty in accessing long-distance interpretations with a reflexive, including zibun ‘self,’ and the cause of this difficulty is not clear. The first investigation of this dissertation is corpus analyses examining how frequent empathy verbs are in child-directed speech and what kinds of cues for speaker’s empathy children receive. I show that Japanese children are exposed to linguistic cues and non-linguistic cues for speaker’s empathy with the empathy verbs fairly robustly. Based on this finding, I experimentally investigate whether children can really use these cues to learn novel empathy verbs, and the experiment found that the linguistic cue is far more helpful than the non-linguistic cue in learning the novel empathy verbs. Moreover, I also show that Japanese children come to master the empathy-encoding properties of the empathy verbs by around age 6yrs, but some children have already mastered them as young as age 4yrs or possibly younger. I further investigate whether children extend their knowledge of the empathy verbs to other empathy-related phenomena, which are not provided in the input. My third experiment examines how early Japanese children (come to) restrict an antecedent of zibun ‘self’ to the long-distance subject when it is required by an empathy verb. The result shows that 6-year-old children are almost at ceiling, and some younger children are able to restrict zibun’s antecedent to the long-distance subject with the empathy verb, even if there is almost no direct evidence in the child-directed speech. The final experiment examines children’s acquisition of long-distance interpretations of zibun ‘self’ licensed by one of the mental verbs, the belief verb omou ‘think.’ The results show that children’s interpretation of the belief verb, omou ‘think,’ significantly affects their interpretation of zibun. This result supports a view that one of the causes for children’s difficulty with long-distance interpretations of zibun is their non-adult-like interpretation of the belief verb, omou ‘think.’ | |
| dcterms.extent | 244 pages | |
| dcterms.language | en | |
| dcterms.publisher | University of Hawai'i at Manoa | |
| dcterms.rights | All UHM dissertations and theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission from the copyright owner. | |
| dcterms.type | Text | |
| local.identifier.alturi | http://dissertations.umi.com/hawii:12229 |
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