Language Development of Japanese Children Raised in Institutional Care.

Background: Nurturing environments have a critical influence on children's language development. It is unclear to what extent nurturing environments in institutions influence children's language development.

Methods: The present study investigated the early lexical development in Japanese children raised in institutional care (IC) (N = 86; 10-33 months; 37 boys) and compared their lexical skills to a large sample of age peers being raised in biological family care (BFC) (N = 1897; 937 boys) using vocabulary checklists.

The potential role of robust face representations learned within families when searching for one's child in a crowd.

Own child's face is one of the most socially salient stimuli for parents, and a faster search for it than for other children's faces may help provide warmer and more sensitive care. However, it has not been experimentally examined whether parents find their child's face faster. In addition, although own child's face is specially processed, the search time for own child's face may be similar to that for other socially salient stimuli, such as own or spouse's faces.

Selective attention to the mouth of a talker in Japanese-learning infants and toddlers: Its relationship with vocabulary and compensation for noise.

Infants increasingly gaze at the mouth of talking faces during the latter half of the first postnatal year. This study investigated mouth-looking behavior of 120 full-term infants and toddlers (6 months-3 years) and 12 young adults (21-24 years) from Japanese monolingual families. The purpose of the study included: (1) Is such an attentional shift to the mouth in infancy similarly observed in Japanese environment where contribution of visual speech is known to be relatively weak? (2) Can noisy conditions increase mouth-looking behavior of Japanese young children? (3) Is the mouth-looking behavior related to language acquisition? To this end, movies of a talker speaking short phrases were presented while manipulating signal-to-noise ratio (SNR: Clear, SN+4, and SN-4).

Relationship between oxytocin and maternal approach behaviors to infants' vocalizations.

Infants communicate their emotions to caregivers mainly through vocalizations. Research has shown that maternal oxytocin levels relate to adaptive parenting; however, little empirical research exists regarding the effects of endogenous oxytocin levels on maternal responses to infant vocalizations. Thus, in this study, we examined the relationship between mothers' salivary oxytocin levels, subjective feelings, and behavioral response to infants' emotional vocalizations.

Corrigendum: Touching! An Augmented Reality System for Unveiling Face Topography in Very Young Children.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2019.

Differential Effects of Infant Vocalizations on Approach-Avoidance Postural Movements in Mothers.

Infant vocalization plays a pivotal role in communicating infant mood to parents and thereby motivating parenting responses. Although many psychological and neural responses to infant vocalization have been reported, few studies have examined maternal approach-avoidance behavior in response to infant vocalization. Thus, this research sought to determine how infant emotional vocalization affects maternal behavior.

Touching! An Augmented Reality System for Unveiling Face Topography in Very Young Children.

Developmental body topography, particularly of the face, is a fundamental research topic in the current decade. However, empirical investigation of this topic for very young children faces a number of difficulties related to the task requirements and technical procedures. In this study, we developed a new task to study the spatially-sensed position of facial parts in a self-face recognition task for 2.

The Use of Pitch Accent in Word-Object Association by Monolingual Japanese Infants.

This study investigated the lexical use of Japanese pitch accent in Japanese-learning infants. A word-object association task revealed that 18-month-old infants succeeded in learning the associations between two nonsense objects paired with two nonsense words minimally distinguished by pitch pattern (Experiment 1). In contrast, 14-month-old infants failed (Experiment 2).

Pareidolia in infants.

Faces convey primal information for our social life. This information is so primal that we sometimes find faces in non-face objects. Such illusory perception is called pareidolia.

Perception of vowel length by Japanese- and English-learning infants.

This study investigated vowel length discrimination in infants from 2 language backgrounds, Japanese and English, in which vowel length is either phonemic or nonphonemic. Experiment 1 revealed that English 18-month-olds discriminate short and long vowels although vowel length is not phonemically contrastive in English. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that Japanese 18-month-olds also discriminate the pairs but in an asymmetric manner: They detected only the change from long to short vowel, but not the change in the opposite direction, although English infants in Experiment 1 detected the change in both directions.

Audiovisual matching of lips and non-canonical sounds in 8-month-old infants.

Japanese 8-month-olds were tested to investigate the matching of particular lip movements to corresponding non-canonical sounds, namely a bilabial trill (BT) and a whistle (WL). The results showed that the infants succeeded in lip-voice matching for the bilabial trill, whereas they failed to do so for the whistle.

Age-related changes in sensitivity to native phonotactics in Japanese infants.

Japanese infants at the ages of 6, 12, and 18 months were tested on their ability to discriminate three nonsense words with different phonotactic status: canonical keetsu, noncanonical but possible keets, and noncanonical and impossible keet. The results showed that 12 and 18 months olds discriminate the keets/keetsu pair, but infants in all age groups fail to discriminate the keets/keet pair. Taken together with the findings in our previous study [Kajikawa et al.

Longitudinal developmental changes in spectral peaks of vowels produced by Japanese infants.

This paper describes a longitudinal analysis of the vowel development of two Japanese infants in terms of spectral resonant peaks. This study aims to investigate when and how the two infants become able to produce categorically separated vowels, and covers the ages of 4 to 60 months in order to provide detailed findings on the developmental process of speech production. The two lower spectral peaks were estimated from vowels extracted from natural spontaneous speech produced by the infants.

Cross-language sensitivity to phonotactic patterns in infants.

This study explored sensitivity to word-level phonotactic patterns in English and Japanese monolingual infants. Infants at the ages of 6, 12, and 18 months were tested on their ability to discriminate between test words using a habituation-switch experimental paradigm. All of the test words, neek, neeks, and neekusu, are phonotactically legitimate for English, whereas the first two words are critically noncanonical in Japanese.

Baby arithmetic: one object plus one tone.

Recent studies using a violation-of-expectation task suggest that preverbal infants are capable of recognizing basic arithmetical operations involving visual objects. There is still debate, however, over whether their performance is based on any expectation of the arithmetical operations, or on a general perceptual tendency to prefer visually familiar and complex displays. Here we provide new evidence that 5-month-old infants recognize basic arithmetic operations across sensory modalities.