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Exploring the emergence of language-unique event perception and description in children

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Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 3. Mai 2025
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Abstract

When describing an event in which one participant acts on the other, English native speakers tend to perceive the participant at the beginning of the action chain as the most salient and describe it as the subject. In contrast, native Japanese speakers tend to perceive the participant with the highest degree of empathy as the most salient and describe it as the subject. In order to examine when children acquire this language-unique pattern of perceiving and describing, this study conducted a picture description experiment on English/Japanese native children aged 3–5 years old. The results showed that already at the age of 3, there was a clear difference between Japanese and English native children in terms of which participant in the event they focus on. This study also found that this difference contributes to the fact that native Japanese children can use passive voice, despite cognitive and morphological complexity, from the age of 3 years old.


Corresponding author: Hajime Ito, Kansai University of International Studies, 3-1 Suwayamacho, Chuo-ku, Kobe-shi, Hyogo, 650-0006, Japan, E-mail:

Funding source: JSPS KAKENHI

Award Identifier / Grant number: 20K00794

Award Identifier / Grant number: 23K00743

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper were presented on several occasions including International Congress of Infant Studies XXII, The 37th annual meeting of Japanese Cognitive Science Society, and The 166th Meeting of the Linguistic Society of Japan. I appreciate all the audience members for their precious feedback. I also would like to express my sincere gratitude to Jeffrey Pennington, Kim Kanel, Ritsuko Ito, and Sandra Turretta for their great support in data collection, despite the difficult situation during the corona epidemic.

  1. Research funding: This work was partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 20K00794 and by 23K00743.

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Received: 2023-12-18
Accepted: 2024-06-24
Published Online: 2025-05-03
Published in Print: 2025-05-26

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Heruntergeladen am 28.11.2025 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/jjl-2025-2005/pdf?lang=de
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