The Acquisition of Empathy: Grammatical versus Observational Cues

Learning the meanings of words, especially verbs, is challenging for children, since word/verb meaning is notoriously difficult to determine from use alone. Previous theories of learning have proposed that children rely on their innate grammar to help them determine the meanings of verbs, though the kinds of verbs that have been investigated are limited.

This project investigates a particularly challenging set of verbs – verbs of empathy – in a language where their acquisition has never been investigated before. This project thus sheds light on the learning mechanisms that children use to learn the meanings of verbs. The outcomes of this project provide data on whether children are able to encode empathy at early ages, and what kinds of evidence children use to learn verbs.

Results from this project further provide insights into language learning for child learners of second languages as well as language training for children with varied language learning abilities.

The project investigates the acquisition of empathy verbs in a language where these verbs encode who the speaker of a sentence most empathizes with in an event. These verbs help speakers of languages that encode such grammatical information to convey complex social and mental connections to their interlocutors and require speakers of these languages to understand that other speakers may empathize with different individuals from those that they themselves empathize with.

This latter concept is referred to as theory of mind. The first set of experiments investigates whether children can acquire empathy verbs using only grammatical evidence in their input. The second set investigates whether children can acquire these verbs using contextual, observable evidence instead.

Finally, the third set of experiments are various tests typically used to assess theory of mind, where the results are correlated with those of the first two sets of experiments. The outcomes provide evidence on whether acquisition of empathy is aided by focusing on grammar versus contextual (non-grammatical) cues, thus leading to a greater understanding of language and social development.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.