Interpretation and processing of the Japanese reflexive zibun by native Japanese and Chinese-speaking learners

On 14 March, 2024, Makiko Hirakawa (Chuo University) will present research on "Interpretation and processing of the Japanese reflexive zibun by native Japanese

and Chinese-speaking learners". The talk will be followed by a light drinks reception and dinner with the speaker.

Talk:

There have been extensive research on the L2 acquisition of reflexive binding in various languages including English, Japanese and Chinese. Reflexives in English must be linked to a c-commanding NP that matches the reflexive in person, gender and number features (e.g., Billi said that Johnj hurt himself*i/j ., *Billi said that Maryj hurt himself*i/*j .). In contrast, Japanese and Chinese reflexives, zibun and ziji, can be bound either by a local antecedent or by a long-distance (LD) antecedent. Both anaphors have no person, number features, and they must be animate. A number of studies have examined L2 acquisition of zibun by L1 English (Thomas, 1993; Yuan, 1998; Kano & Nakayama, 2004; Yoshimura et al., 2012), but only a few have targeted learners whose L1 also has a mono-morphemic reflexive (Umeda et al. 2017, 2022). In this talk, I will report on a study investigating interpretation and processing of the Japanese reflexive zibun by native speakers and Chinese-speaking learners, focusing on subject orientation, a property that Japanese and Chinese reflexives share. The results from an off-line antecedent identification task show that L2 learners performed somehow differently from native speakers, showing some preference for a non-subject NP, which is not an antecedent candidate for zibun. For an on-line self-paced reading task, where two possible candidate antecedents could be considered for zibun, L2 learners took longer than native speakers to select an antecedent. I argue that L1-L2 similarity does not guarantee target-like real-time comprehension of zibun in Japanese.