Intergenerational Relationships Shaped by Sentence-Final Markers: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials of Honorifics and Sentence-Final Particles in Japanese

Abstract

Sentence-final linguistic markers often realize socioemotional functions with interlocutors. Particularly, sentence-final particles (SFPs) in East and Southeast Asian languages are specialized lexical items that express a speaker’s mental attitude toward an interlocutor. Comprising a variety of items and uses, SFPs allow significant individual differences in usage that can impair intergenerational relationships. In this study we examined reactions to the Japanese sentence-final honorific kudasai and SFP ne in sentences among typically developed native speakers of Japanese of older and younger age groups. We compared the auditory perception of these items by generation and gender, utilizing early posterior negativity (EPN) as an emotionally sensitive index of event-related potentials collected via electroencephalograms, as well as participants’ subjective ratings. The results revealed that older adults rated sentences without honorifics more harshly, and that older men and women displayed significant EPNs in opposite directions. Older women exhibited EPN in sentences without ne, whereas older men exhibited EPN for sentences with ne. Younger men also exhibited significant EPN for sentences without ne. We interpret the EPN as an index of emotional anomaly in these usages and discuss how the use of sentence-final markers can affect intergenerational relationships.