Behavioral and Neuroimaging Research of Reading: a Case of Japanese.

Behavioral studies showed that AS, an English-Japanese bilingual, was a skilled reader in Japanese but was a phonological dyslexic in English. This behavioral dissociation was accounted for by the Hypothesis of Transparency and Granularity postulated by Wydell and Butterworth. However, a neuroimaging study using magnetoencephalography (MEG) revealed that AS has the same functional deficit in the left superior temporal gyrus (STG).

Speech misperception: speaking and seeing interfere differently with hearing.

Speech perception is thought to be linked to speech motor production. This linkage is considered to mediate multimodal aspects of speech perception, such as audio-visual and audio-tactile integration. However, direct coupling between articulatory movement and auditory perception has been little studied.

Reliability of familiarity rating of ordinary Japanese words for different years and places.

Two-word familiarity sets were measured in different years (1995 and 2002) and places (Kanto and Kinki, in Japan) for a large number of Japanese words, to examine the reliability of familiarity ratings. The correlation between the word familiarities of the two sets was extremely high (r = .958, N = 10,515).

Fundamental frequency of infants' and parents' utterances in longitudinal recordings.

The fundamental frequencies (F0) of daily life utterances of Japanese infants and their parents from the infant's birth until about 5 years of age were longitudinally analyzed. The analysis revealed that an infant's F0 mean decreases as a function of month of age. It also showed that within- and between-utterance variability in infant F0 is different before and after the onset of two-word utterances, probably reflecting the difference between linguistic and nonlinguistic utterances.

Speech overlap in Japanese mother-child conversations.

This study aimed to clarify the development of conversational style in Japanese mother-child interactions. We focused on the frequency of speech overlap as an index of Japanese conversational style, with particular attention to ne, a particle produced by the speaker, and to backchannels, such as 'uh-huh', produced by the listener that support sympathetic conversation. The results of longitudinal observations of two Japanese mother-child dyads from approximately 0;11 to 3;3 suggest that an adultlike conversational style with frequent overlaps emerges in Japanese child-directed speech around the two-word utterance period, and a child's development of ne use is closely related to this shift.

Variables affecting naming latency for Japanese Kanji: a re-analysis of Yamazaki, et al. (1997).

Yamazaki, Ellis, Morrison, and Lambon Ralph in 1997 demonstrated that written and spoken age-of-acquisitions had a stronger effect on the naming latency of single Kanji words than any other variable including familiarity. The present study was designed to reanalyze Yamazaki, et al.'s data, using the ratings of written and spoken age-of-acquisitions and visual and auditory familiarities taken from the NTT lexical database.