Japanese Characters Research Articles

Monosyllable speech perception of Japanese hearing aid users with prelingual hearing loss: implications for surgical indication of cochlear implant

Objective: The monosyllable speech perception ability after years of educational intervention was compared between prelingually deafened pediatric hearing aid users and their cochlear implant counterparts. Design: An open-set monosyllabic speech perception test was conducted on all subjects. The test required subjects to indicate a corresponding Japanese character to that spoken by the examiner. Fifty-two subjects with prelingual hearing impairment (47 hearing aid users and 5 cochlear implant users) were examined. Results: Hearing aid users with average pure-tone thresholds less than 90 dB HL demonstrated generally better monosyllable perception than 70%, which was equivalent or better performance than that of the cochlear implant group. Widely dispersed speech perception was observed within the 90–99 dB HL hearing-aid user group with most subjects demonstrating less than 50% speech perception. In the cluster of >100 dB HL, few cases demonstrated more than 50% in speech perception. The perception ability of the vowel part of each mora within the cochlear implant group was 100% and corresponding to that of hearing aid users with moderate and severe hearing loss. Conclusion: Hearing ability among cochlear implant users can be comparable with that of hearing aid users with average unaided pure-tone thresholds of 90 dB HL, after monosyllabic speech perception testing was performed.

3407 機械機構模型のデータベース構築

Kyoto University imported machine mechanism models from Gustav Voigt. Co., Germany in 1903. But, only a copy of the purchase slip where German explanation was written in "Katakana" that are Japanese characters is preserved, and the original formal names were lost. Recently it has been made clear that the names of most models in the purchase slip are contained in the catalog in Cornell University, and author reported about it in the last annual meeting of JSME. In this research, a database will be built in order to make easy collation with the models and the names that are described in the purchase slip, or to make easy comparison examination with other machine mechanism models in the future.

Perceptions of kanji learning strategies

This study investigates three important issues in kanji learning strategies; namely, strategy use, effectiveness of strategy and orthographic background. A questionnaire on kanji learning strategy use and perceived effectiveness was administered to 116 beginner level, undergraduate students of Japanese from alphabetic and character backgrounds in Australia. Both descriptive and statistical analyses of the questionnaire responses revealed that the strategies used most often are the most helpful. Repeated writing was reported as the most used strategy type although alphabetic background learners reported using repeated writing strategies significantly more often than character background learners. The importance of strategy training and explicit instruction of fundamental differences between character and alphabetic background learners of Japanese is discussed in relation to teaching strategies.

Diversity Patterns of Attitudes Toward Nature and Environment in Japan, USA, and European Nations

This paper analyzes the longitudinal changes of Japanese attitudes toward nature and environment (ATNE) using Japanese character survey data, and explores the structural characteristics of response patterns to the ATNE in Japan, USA and five European nations based on analytical results derived from crossnational survey data. We also discuss the relationships of respondent’s attributes relative to the structure of their response patterns using the visual configuration obtained by correspondence analysis. In addition, we verify how racial, cultural, geographic diversities change people’s ATNE in various circumstances. As a result, we have found that Japan is similar to France, and Germany is similar to Britain and the Netherlands. We have also seen that the USA is similar to Italy in the aspect of the ATNE whereas the Japanese have their own distinctive structures of response patterns to the ATNE when compared to the Americans and the Europeans.

Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown missions and Japanese romances

Daughters of a British father and a Chinese mother, Edith and Winnifred Eaton pursued wildly different paths. While Edith wrote stories of downtrodden Chinese immigrants under the pen name Sui Sin Far, Winnifred presented herself as Japanese American and published Japanese romance novels in English under the name Onoto Watanna. In this invigorating reappraisal of the vision and accomplishments of the Eaton sisters, Dominika Ferens departs boldly from the dichotomy that has informed most commentary on them: Edith's authentic representations of Chinese North Americans versus Winnifred's phony portrayals of Japanese characters and settings. Arguing that Edith as much as Winnifred constructed her persona along with her pen name, Ferens considers the fiction of both Eaton sisters as ethnography. Edith and Winnifred Eaton suggests that both authors wrote through the filter of contemporary ethnographic discourse on the Far East and also wrote for readers hungry for authentic insight into the morals, manners, and mentality of an exotic other. Ferens traces two distinct discursive traditions - missionary and travel writing - that shaped the meanings of China and Japan in the nineteenth century. She shows how these traditions intersected with the unconventional literary careers of the Eaton sisters, informing the sober, moralistic tone of Edith's stories as well as Winnifred's exotic narrative style, plots, settings, and characterizations. Bringing to the Eatons' writings a contemporary understanding of the racial and textual politics of ethnographic writing, this important account shows how these two very different writers claimed ethnographic authority, how they used that authority to explore ideas of difference, race, class and gender, and how their depictions of nonwhites worked to disrupt the process of whites' self-definition.

Handwritten Japanese Character Recognition Using Adaptive Shape Normalization by Global Affine Transformation

This paper proposes a new, promising character recognition system with a category-dependent shape normalization technique that normalizes an input pattern against each reference pattern adaptively using global affine transformation (GAT) as follows. (1) An input character pattern is fed to basic OCR, the most powerful of the conventional OCRs. (2) The basic OCR plays the role of rough classification and outputs a small set of candidate categories for the input pattern. (3) GAT normalizes the input pattern against each candidate's reference pattern adaptively. (4) Each adaptively normalized input pattern is fed again to the basic OCR. (5) The final recognition result is obtained using the updated distance values within candidate categories. In experiments, our basic OCR linked to GAT adaptive normalization is successfully applied to 28,694 patterns of totally unconstrained handwritten characters, including Kanji, Kana, and alphanumerics, written by 300 people, with substantial improvements in recognition accuracy.

Study on validity of visual performance and comfort test using Japanese characters

The validity of applying Japanese characters to a visual performance and comfort test (ISO9241-3 Amendment 1) in conducting an LCD-CRT comparative experiment was studied. The evaluation results from using Japanese characters were similar to those from using alphanumeric characters, while the experiment time was shorter. The test method is thus also valid for Japanese character displays.

Microstate analysis of information processing in a reading task with Kanji and Katakana

The present study investigated the differences in time course and the brain electric signature during the reading process of two types of Japanese characters, Kanji (morphograms) and Katakana (syllabograms). We studied 18 right-handed Japanese females, healthy, informed volunteers. Subjects observed a sequence of Kanji and Katakana words, both consisting of two syllables for 50 ms in either the left visual field (LVF) or the right visual field (RVF) at intervals of 2000 ms, while 39-channel-EEG were recorded. Four average ERP map series were separately averaged using letter criterion and stimulus conditions for each subject. The ERPs from all conditions and subjects were averaged and segmented into microstates, which were quasi-stable landscapes of potential distribution maps. The microstate topographies were assessed numerically by the electric gravity center, a conservative estimate of the mean location of all intracerebral, active, electric sources. To assess the differences of the electric gravity center between Kanji and Katakana, the mean vector was compared between two conditions using a paired t-test. Significantly, different microstates were found between Kanji and Katakana. In the RVF presentation, Kanji were more right lateralized than Katakana at 178–262 ms, and in the LVF presentation, Kanji were also more right lateralized than Katakana at 214–338 ms. These temporal and spatial aspects suggest that the differences between Kanji and Katakana reading already appear at early information processing stages, and this difference was independent of the input hemisphere.

“Baseball saved us”: Recreation as refuge in a world war ii Japanese American prison camp1

This study evaluated the role of recreation in the lives of internees at Man‐zanar, a Japanese American World War II prison camp located in California's Owens Valley. Specifically, the meaning of various art forms, organized sports and games, clubs and associations, and nature appreciation were interpreted in light of Yamato Damashii, Japanese character or spirit. The results of the study indicated that recreational pastimes were an important form of solace for internees, young and old alike. Implications for the way in which the story of Manzanar—recently designated a National Historic Site— might shed light on the significance of recreation in times of civil unrest conclude the article.

年代別視力のデータベースと日本語文字の最小可読閾

年代別視力のデータベースと日本語文字の最小可読閾

Visual Perception of Japanese Characters and Complicated Figures

Visual Perception of Japanese Characters and Complicated Figures

Japanese elderly and computers in the workplace

As computers are rapidly introduced into workplaces, elderly people might have difficulty adapting to the new work environments. In addition to natural changes with age, factors such as cultural and linguistic differences may also make it challenging for older generation adults. This paper aims to examine these factors and propose possible interventions, citing experiences Japanese elderly might have. The factors discussed include the cognitive demand in handling a huge number of Japanese characters on computers, the demand to learn concepts and terms developed in regions with different languages, and difficulties in learning applications designed based on different work cultures. The discussions may seem to be specific to Japanese, however they may also apply to other societies with different languages and cultural backgrounds, and also to the design of computer systems that must support a wide variety of users.

ＬＣＤの画素密度と表示文字の読取りやすさとの関係

We investigated the effects of pixel density, character matrix size, and character size on the subjective legibility of liquid-crystal displays (LCDs). At a 30cm viewing distance, 50 subjects assessed the legibility under 33 different display conditions, we used 6 × 4.5 photographs to simulate the LCDs. We found that the character matrix for Japanese characters should be more than 10 × 10pixels when the characters are smaller than 2.7mm. For characters 2.7 to 3.5mm, the character matrixes should be 15 × 15 to 17 × 17 for single-stroke characters, and 22 × 21 to 27 × 27 for double-stroke characters. These results show that the preferred character matrix depends on pixel density, character size, and stroke width. The preferred stroke width for Japanese characters is 200 to 300 μ m. From the legibility point of view, the pixel density of displays should be increased to 250 or 300pixels per inch.

Campus Xenophobia and the Multicultural Project: Ethical Criticism and Ishmael Reed's Japanese by Spring

Expensively kept, economically unsound, a spurious useless political asset in election campaigns, racism is as healthy today as was during the Enlightenment. (63) --Toni Morrison, playing in the dark Although ethical criticism offers a valuable discourse for exploring concepts of community, goodness, love their centrality in the moral construction of literary works, also provides us with a useful methodology for considering the function of these philosophical constructs in regard to the most fractious issues that confront the academy today, the especially divisive notions of race. As Samuel Fleischacker perceptively observes in The Ethics of Culture (1994), Writers on usually show little understanding of what makes an argument or decision ethical, while writers on ethics have rarely done much serious thinking about (ix). Because issues associated with racial prejudice cultural division continue to plague our post-secondary institutions, they merit particular attention in any study of contemporary academic fiction. The ethical interpretation of these enduring social dilemmas in novels about university life also underscores the tremendous ideological gulf that exists between monoculturalism multiculturalism, the two disparate schools of thought that dominate the intellectual conversation regarding these subjects. The controversial emergence of the multicultural project in recent decades, as well as the ensuing culture that bifurcated the national debate over higher education during the late 1980s early 1990s, demonstrates the incendiary nature of the scholarly media response to the multiculturalist agenda for engendering an atmosphere of pluralism racial cultural inclusiveness in our institutions of higher education. In Japanese by Spring (1993), Ishmael Reed satirically illustrates the social intellectual rancor that accompanied the localization of the wars during the early 1990s. In addition to depicting the divergent nuances of the scholarly response to multiculturalism, Reed's novel offers a blistering attack upon the various cultural racial factions of the academy the bankrupt value systems that he critiques from within its hallowed corridors. Reed's academic satire intersects a number of significant intellectual issues, moreover, including the ethics of multiculturalism, the dangers inherent in the monoculturalist position, finally, the fundamental notions of authorship narrative authority. By approaching his text from so many disparate perspectives, Reed demonstrates the ways in which racism cultural exclusion infect our institutions of higher learning from a wide range of often unexpected locales. In this manner, Reed consistently problematizes the ethical stances of his academic characters in Japanese by Spring, especially those figures who champion the tenets of monoculturalism. In his essay, Soyinka among the Monoculturalists, for example, Reed reveals his particular antipathy for academics who deride the pluralistic intentions of the multicultural project: distrust the monoculturalists' point of view so much that when they praise something I become suspicious, he writes, and when they condemn something, I feel that there must be something praiseworthy about it (211). In his Introduction to Multi-Ethnic America: Essays on Cultural Wars Cultural Peace (1997), Reed describes monoculturalism as an anti-intellectual coalition that frequently employs dubious phraseology about a common in order to resist the ethical mandates of multiculturalism (xvii). Reed's efforts in support of the multicultural project manifest themselves in his satiric novels directed toward the American institutions that, at least in Reed's estimation, bear the responsibility for the nation's bankrupt cultural value systems. (1) Yet Reed's narratives frequently confound readers because of his intentional elevation of ideology over character in his fictions. …

Absence of perceptual segmentation in image generation by normals

We used kanji characters (Chinese ideographic characters) and hiragana characters (Japanese phonographic characters) in the transfer‐appropriate processing paradigm to examine whether or not people without brain damage conduct perceptual segmentation while generating a visual mental image. Ninety‐six participants were divided into three study conditions: (a) seeing hiragana characters and generating a mental image of the corresponding kanji characters; (b) seeing the kanji characters; and (c) seeing the hiragana characters without generating the image of the kanji characters. Generating an image of a kanji character did not transfer at test to the decision as to whether the visually presented kanji character was vertically segmented or not, whereas it did transfer to a semantic decision as to whether the kanji character had a concrete or abstract meaning. Seeing a kanji character transferred to both decisions. Seeing hiragana characters without generating an image of the kanji characters transferred to neither decision. These results suggest that perceptual segmentation is not routinely conducted by normals in the process of image generation.

Ideographic characters call for extra processing to correspond with phonemes.

Cortical areas used in the copying of Japanese ideographic characters and syllabic characters were studied using functional magnetic resonance imaging in healthy volunteers. Complexity of characters was controlled to illustrate differences resulting from character to sound conversion differences between the ideographic and syllabic characters. Statistical comparisons indicated extensive activation in the fusiform gyrus, posterior portions around the intraparietal sulcus and in the conjunction area of BA 6, 9 and 44 (which is assumed to be Exner's area) during the copying of ideographic characters. These findings suggested that indirectness between ideographic characters and their pronunciation demands extra processing such as semantic mediation and intensive grapheme processing in comparison with syllabic characters.

Effect of mirabilitum in formularization: change of prolyl endopeptidase inhibitory activity and of constituents using the preparation method of Tokaku-joki-to.

To clarify the effect of Mirabilitum in formularization, change of prolyl endopeptidase inhibitory activity and of constituents using the preparation method of a Kampo formula Tokaku-joki-to ([Japanese characters: see text], Persia and Rhubarb combination) was examined by the liquid chromatography-mass spectroscopy (LC-MS) method. Mirabilitum under boiling condition caused qualitative and quantitative change of the constituents through hydrolysis which caused a change of its activity. This was considered to be the main reason the classical Chinese medical book "Shang han lun ([Japanese characters: see text])" specified that Mirabilitum should be added at a later stage of decoction.

On-Line Japanese Character Input System for the Blind Person

We have developed a pen-based Japanese character input system for the blind person (particularly persons with acquired blindness). This system is composed of a personal computer and a control board with an electronic tablet. The blind person is able to get the screen information by using a voice synthesizer. We have investigated various problems that arise when the blind person edits the document by using this system and solved those problems. Furthermore this system is applied to an electronic mail system for the blind person. From the experimental results, we have confirmed that the proposed pen-based system makes it easy to input Japanese characters for the novice blind user without training.

Recognition of printed arabic text based on global features and decision tree learning techniques

Machine simulation of human reading has been the subject of intensive research for almost three decades. A large number of research papers and reports have already been published on Latin, Chinese and Japanese characters. However, little work has been conducted on the automatic recognition of Arabic in both on-line and off-line, has been achieved towards the automatic recognition of Arabic characters. This is a result of the lack of adequate support in terms of funding, and other utilities such as Arabic text databases, dictionaries, etc., and of course because of the cursive nature of its writing rules, and this problem is still an open research field. This paper presents a new technique for the recognition of Arabic text using the C4.5 machine learning system. The advantage of machine learning are twofold: it can generalize over the large degree of variations between different fonts and writing style and recognition rules can be constructed by examples. The technique can be divided into three major steps. The first step is digitization and pre-processing to create connected component, detect the skew of a document image and correct it. Second, feature extraction, where global features of the input Arabic word is used to extract features such as number of subwords, number of peaks within the subword, number and position of the complementary character, etc., to avoid the difficulty of segmentation stage. Finally, machine learning C4.5 is used to generate a decision tree for classifying each word. The system was tested with 1000 Arabic words with different fonts (each word has 15 samples) and the correct average recognition rate obtained using cross-validation was 92%.

14.3: Study on Validity of Visual Performance and Comfort Test (ISO 9241‐3 Amendment) for LCD‐CRT Comparative Experiment Applied to Japanese Characters

AbstractThe validity of applying Japanese characters to a visual performance and comfort test (ISO9241‐3 Amendment) in conducting an LCD‐CRT comparative experiment was studied. The evaluation results from using Japanese characters were similar to those from using alphanumeric characters, while the experiment time was shorter. The test method is thus also valid for Japanese character displays.