Abstract
This study examines the neural substrate of the understanding of human relationships in verbal communication with Japanese honorific sentences as experimental materials. We manipulated two types of Japanese verbs specifically used to represent respect for others, i.e., exalted and humble verbs, which represent respect for the person in the subject and the person in the object, respectively. We visually presented appropriate and anomalous sentences containing the two types of verbs and analyzed the electroencephalogram elicited by the verbs. We observed significant parietal negativity at a latency of approximately 400 ms for anomalous verbs compared with appropriate verbs. This parietal negativity could be a manifestation of the pragmatic process used to integrate the linguistic forms with the human relationships represented in the sentences. The topographies of these event-related potentials (ERPs) corresponded well with those of ERPs for two second-person pronouns in Chinese (plain ni and respectful nin). This correspondence suggests that the pragmatic integration process in honorific expressions is cross-linguistically common in part. Furthermore, we assessed the source localization by means of independent component (IC) analysis and dipole fitting and observed a significant difference in ERP between the honorific and control sentences in the IC cluster centered in the precentral gyrus and in the cluster centered in the medial part of the occipital lobe, which corresponded well with the functional magnetic resonance imaging findings for Japanese honorification. We also found several significant differences in the time-frequency analyses for the medial occipital cluster. These significant differences in the medial occipital cluster suggested that the circuit of the theory of mind was involved in the processing of Japanese honorification. Our results suggest that pragmatic and syntactic processing are performed in parallel because the person to be respected must fulfill the grammatical function appropriate for the honorific verb.
Highlights
HONORIFICATION AS SOCIAL COGNITIONMany neuroscientists and cognitive scientists have begun to pay substantial attention to the mental and neural mechanisms of human social behavior
This study examined the neural activity related to the processing of honorific expressions in Japanese to discuss the neural substrate for the understanding of the human relationship in verbal communication as one of social cognition
Our experimental results, which correspond well with findings related to Chinese pronouns, suggest the presence of a processes to integrate the linguistic forms with the relationship between the speakers as a part of world knowledge
Summary
HONORIFICATION AS SOCIAL COGNITIONMany neuroscientists and cognitive scientists have begun to pay substantial attention to the mental and neural mechanisms of human social behavior. Verbal communication is one such social behavior, and politeness is a linguistic phenomenon that is a direct manifestation of human relationships. While politeness is universal in human communication, the linguistic forms used. EEG Analysis of Japanese Honorification to express politeness vary depending on the relationship between the speaker and the addressee(s), that is, their gender, the relative social power, and the intimacy between them (Brown and Levinson, 1978). The effects of these aspects of human relationships can differ in strength among languages and cultures; politeness is a suitable phenomenon for examining the universal and language-specific properties of human social behavior. Several examples in English presented in (1) can be used to communicate the intention of the speaker to ask the addressee to open a window. The intention of the speaker is directly expressed in (1-a), whereas (1-b-f) are examples in which the intention is communicated indirectly
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