Volume 41, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Japanese Psycholinguistics in Its Developmental and Acquisitional Aspects

This study explores the relationship between prosody and quantifier scope interpretation in the context of Japanese-speaking children and adults. Prior research has investigated how prosody, a universal quantifier and negation interact in the theoretical literature of Japanese linguistics, yet the empirical evidence remains inconclusive. Employing a Picture-Selection task, we investigate how Thematic Topic (TT) and Contrastive Topic (CT) prosody affect interpretation. The results reveal that both children and adults exhibit sensitivity to prosodic distinctions, with a less preference for the surface scope interpretation with the CT prosody. The results also demonstrate highly ambiguous nature of the TT prosody. The discrepancy in response times suggests potential processing disparities between age groups and highlights the complex interplay of prosody and quantifier scope.

It has been observed cross-linguistically that children often show non-adult-like behavior with sentences containing focus phrases, such as only in English. Children often misinterpret sentences in which focus phrases modify subjects, whereas they exhibit adult-like behaviors when they modify VPs or objects. That is, a subject-object asymmetry is observed in children’s incorrect associations of focus phrases. Although many previous studies have addressed this issue, why children show such non-adult-like behavior and subject-object asymmetry is largely unknown. This paper examines Japanese-speaking children’s interpretations of scrambled sentences containing the Japanese focus particle dake (O- dake S V sentences) and demonstrates that children clearly show adult-like behavior with them. Based on the results of this experiment, it is concluded that linear order is irrelevant to their non-adult-like behavior, as discussed by previous studies. Further, based on the novel observation, it is claimed that superficial (i.e., at the Surface-structure level in a traditional sense) c-command relations between an NP with dake and another NP are irrelevant to their incorrect associations of dake . Rather, this observation provides a piece of supporting evidence for the Reconstructed Structure Hypothesis.

When describing an event in which one participant acts on the other, English native speakers tend to perceive the participant at the beginning of the action chain as the most salient and describe it as the subject. In contrast, native Japanese speakers tend to perceive the participant with the highest degree of empathy as the most salient and describe it as the subject. In order to examine when children acquire this language-unique pattern of perceiving and describing, this study conducted a picture description experiment on English/Japanese native children aged 3–5 years old. The results showed that already at the age of 3, there was a clear difference between Japanese and English native children in terms of which participant in the event they focus on. This study also found that this difference contributes to the fact that native Japanese children can use passive voice, despite cognitive and morphological complexity, from the age of 3 years old.

Utterance-final particles (UFPs) in Japanese can be immediately preceded by any lexical item, and can carry various tonal contours, each conveying nuanced meanings in discourse. This paper focuses on the empathetic UFP - ne , investigating its phonological representation (rather than its morphological, syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic representation) based on its usage as established in the literature. While traditionally viewed as a consonant-vowel sequence, our experimental data recorded by a total of 66 typically developed native Japanese speakers reveals the empathetic - ne has a consistently longer duration than the non-empathetic - yo . This paper proposes to represent the vowel of - ne as a structural configuration containing two tone-bearing units (e.g., VV or μμ), and focuses on the infrequent use of this structure among individuals with higher autistic tendencies, specifically in terms of difficulties with social skills.

Two major views have been proposed regarding the mechanism underlying morphological generalization: rule-based and analogy-based mechanisms. The analogy-based mechanism is sensitive to the similarity of nonce words to existing words, whereas the rule-based mechanism is not. This study investigated the production of volitional forms of Japanese verbs whose non-past forms end with suru by using an elicited production experiment with low- and high-frequency real verbs and novel verbs with varying degrees of similarity to existing verbs. The findings are as follows: The conjugational form of the largest verb group was preferred, and an increase in the conjugational form of a smaller verb group was found only in the completely similar condition. These results can be explained by the rule-based mechanism.

This study examined (i) the stage at which pitch accents contribute to lexical processing in native Japanese speakers and (ii) the interpretation pathway for the meaning of words pronounced with incorrect pitch accents. Event-related potential analyses during spoken word processing showed that words with incorrect accents elicited greater N400 amplitudes than those with correct accents, indicating that accent information aids in selecting suitable candidates from activated lexicons rather than in lexical activation itself. We employed a cross-modal semantic priming paradigm for the second aim, which involved exposure to a spoken word (prime) followed by a picture (target). Analyses of event-related spectral perturbations showed that the facilitation of semantic processing of the picture, indicated by low-gamma activity, occurred only after correctly accented words and not after incorrectly accented words. These findings suggest that incorrect Japanese pitch accents inhibit full access to their semantic contents when the words are spoken without appropriate contexts.