Japanese children’s knowledge of the locality of zibun and kare

Figures & data

Table 1. Instances of zibun in MiiPro, Arika corpora; “intra” indicates zibun that takes an intra-sentential antecedent, and “extra” indicates zibun that takes an extra-sentential antecedent; “2nd-person ambiguous” indicates zibun whose status is structurally ambiguous between the indexical use and the one that takes a local null subject antecedent

	2nd-person intra (null subject)	2nd-person extra (indexical)	2nd-person ambiguous	3rd-person intra local	3rd-person intra non-local	3rd-person extra	Total
zibun-de ‘by self’	30	0	0	1	0	0	31
zibun-no ‘self’s’	2	0	0	7	0	3	12
zibun-wa/ga ‘self-TOP/NOM’	0	1	3	0	0	2	6
zibun-wo/ni ‘self-ACC/DAT’	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Total	32	1	3	8	0	5	49

Table 2. Results in Otsu (1997)

Age	# of children	# of children who had adult-like responses
3	5	4
4	11	10
5	15	15

Table 3. Truth values of the test sentences for each scenario

	Experiment 1		Experiment 2
	zibun		kare
Scenario type	(14a)	(14b)	(14a)	(14b)
MATRIX-TRUE scenario	True	False	True	False
EMBEDDED-TRUE scenario	False	True	False	False

Table 4. Example of a story for the MATRIX-TRUE scenario (the abridged version)

Scene #	Picture	Script
1		Taro (a boy in the middle) puts the blindfold on. This blindfold also blocks his hearing. While he cannot see and hear anything, Akira (a boy with a hat on the left side) and Jiro (a boy with spiky hair on the right side) are going to paint on somebody. Taro’s task is to find who used which color paint.
2		It’s Akira’s painting turn. Akira is wondering “Well, I can paint yellow one on my kimono, but this wouldn’t match my kimono. I’ll paint Taro yellow.” (After Akira’s painting event, the experimenter points out that Akira inadvertently left a piece of his pink fan on the yellow paint.)
3		Now it’s Jiro’s turn. Jiro painted the red one on Akira’s head. (After Jiro’s painting event, the experimenter points out that Jiro inadvertently left a piece of his hair on the red paint.)
4		Taro took the blindfold off. He was guessing which boy used which color paint. He first guessed that Akira painted the red one because the red paint seemed to match with Akira’s kimono. Subsequently, he discovered Jiro’s hair on the red paint. He noticed that his guess (Akira painted the red one) was wrong and that Jiro painted the red one.
5		Then Taro guessed that Jiro painted the yellow one. Subsequently, he discovered Akira’s fan on the yellow paint. He noticed that his guess (Jiro painted the yellow one) was wrong and that Akira painted the yellow one.

Table 5. Example of a story for the EMBEDDED-TRUE scenario (the abridged version)

Scene #	Picture	Script
1		Taro (a boy in the middle) puts the blindfold on. This blindfold also blocks his hearing. While he cannot see and hear anything, Akira (a boy with a hat on the left side) and Jiro (a boy with spiky hair on the right side) are going to paint on somebody. Taro’s task is to find who used which color paint.
2		It’s Akira’s painting turn. Akira is wondering “Well, yellow one would match my kimono. I’ll paint yellow one on my kimono.” (After Akira’s painting event, the experimenter points out that Akira inadvertently left a piece of his pink fan on the yellow paint.)
3		Now it’s Jiro’s turn. Jiro painted the red one on Taro’s shirt. (After Jiro’s painting event, the experimenter points out that Jiro inadvertently left a piece of his hair on the red paint.)
4		Taro took the blindfold off. He was guessing which boy used which color paint. He first guessed that Akira painted the red one because the red paint is Akira’s favorite color. Subsequently, he discovered Jiro’s hair on the red paint. He noticed that his guess (Akira painted the red one) was wrong and that Jiro painted the red one.
5		Then Taro guessed that Jiro painted the yellow one. Subsequently, he discovered Akira’s fan on the yellow paint. He noticed that his guess (Jiro painted the yellow one) was wrong and that Akira painted the yellow one.

Figure 1. Rates of correct rejection for control sentences: Points show mean and error bars show standard error of those means

Figure 2. Acceptance rates for test sentences: Points show mean and error bars show standard error of those means

Table 6. Acceptance rates for each test item in Experiment 2

Age-scenario	Test #1	Test #2	Test #3	Test #4
Children EMBEDDED-TRUE	0 (0)	8.3% (1)	8.3% (1)	0 (0)
Children MATRIX-TRUE	66.6% (8)	58.3% (7)	50% (6)	66.6% (8)
Adults EMBEDDED-TRUE	42.9% (9)	23.8% (5)	42.9% (9)	14.3% (3)
Adults MATRIX-TRUE	80% (16)	75% (15)	75% (15)	85% (17)

Otsu, Yukio. 1997. “Zibun futatabi [zibun revisited].” In Program Committee (eds.), Ninchi gengo no seiritsu: Ningen no kokoro no hattatsu [Emergence of Cognition and Language: Development of Human Mind], 113–22. Tokyo: Kuba Pro.

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