Empathy Effects on Antecedent Salience and Anaphor Processing in Japanese

Purpose. The present study investigates whether antecedent saliency is affected by empathy status. That is, the possibility that when the speaker of a sentence empathizes with an entity, called the empathy locus, that entity is more salient than other entities. Accordingly, reduced forms of anaphors would be preferred to fuller forms when referring to an empathy locus. Methods. Two self-paced reading experiments were conducted using two-sentence discourses. Sentence 1 contained empathy-locus and non-empathy-locus antecedents. These were then referred to by fuller and reduced forms of anaphors in Sentence 2. The empathy statuses of the antecedents were indicated by Japanese ‘giving’ verbs, which obligatorily express the empathy locus. Results. Analyses of sentential reading-time results showed a significant interaction of antecedents and anaphors. Sentences 2 were read faster when the anaphors were reduced forms (i.e., null pronouns) than when they were fuller forms, but the reading-speed difference was significantly neutralized when the antecedents were non-empathy loci. Also, this significant neutralization appeared only when the anaphors were overt pronouns (not when they were repeated names) and when the anaphors were not marked by the topic morpheme. Conclusions. The outcomes indicate that empathy-locus antecedents are more salient than non-empathy-locus ones, which affects the choices of fuller or reduced forms of anaphors. Also, the results imply that Japanese overt pronouns may carry anti-logophoricity, which would cause them to avoid referring to empathy loci. In addition, the results imply that the topic’s inherent function, which is to refer to an entity that has previously appeared, may nullify the difference which results from antecedent saliency.