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

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.