The Role of Parental Input in the Early Acquisition of Japanese Politeness Distinctions

Abstract

Japanese polite language (teineigo) varies with the speaker-addressee relationship as well as social norms. Descriptive studies have found that young Japanese children use polite-speech early in development. This claim was experimentally tested in 3- to 6-year-old Japanese children and correct use of polite verb forms was found even in the youngest children. The early acquisition of these verb forms is surprising, because there is a Japanese social norm that parental speech to children is mostly not polite, so it is not clear how children acquire the knowledge of how to use polite forms. To examine this, a large scale corpus analysis of polite language was performed using a probabilistic measure of the intended addressee. We confirmed that parental speech is mostly not polite, but parents also produced a substantial amount of polite language that varied appropriately with addressees and this can help to explain the early use of polite speech in Japanese children under experimental conditions.

How diverse is child language acquisition research?

“…Taking a crosslinguistic approach seems even more important as we move away from the ‘nuts and bolts’ of language to topics that heavily interface with culture, such as pragmatics and discourse (e.g. event packaging in narrative, Berman & Slobin, 1994; politeness, Chang et al, 2021), non-verbal communication (e.g. gesture, Özyürek et al, 2008) and language and cognition (e.g.…”

Abstract structures and meaning in Japanese dative structural priming

“…Since scrambling is not common in English, the double object and prepositional dative structures are the two main alternatives that are generated. In Japanese, the message concept for LEND activates the lemma for kasu (ignoring variation in verb forms, Chang, Tatsumi, Hayakawa, Yoshizaki, & Oka, 2021). But there is only one way to assign syntactic functions and therefore only one structure is possible in function assignment.…”