Japanese Sentences Research Articles

Japanese verb sentence and predication type - focusing on the property predication -

Japanese verb sentence and predication type - focusing on the property predication -

The Interaction of Morphosyntactic and Semantic Processing in Japanese Sentence Comprehension: Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials

The Interaction of Morphosyntactic and Semantic Processing in Japanese Sentence Comprehension: Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials

A study on the omission of the subject and the agent in passive sentences in Japanese

A study on the omission of the subject and the agent in passive sentences in Japanese

Three Factors Are Critical in Order to Synthesize Intelligible Noise-Vocoded Japanese Speech.

Factor analysis (principal component analysis followed by varimax rotation) had shown that 3 common factors appear across 20 critical-band power fluctuations derived from spoken sentences of eight different languages [Ueda et al. (2010). Fechner Day 2010, Padua]. The present study investigated the contributions of such power-fluctuation factors to speech intelligibility. The method of factor analysis was modified to obtain factors suitable for resynthesizing speech sounds as 20-critical-band noise-vocoded speech. The resynthesized speech sounds were used for an intelligibility test. The modification of factor analysis ensured that the resynthesized speech sounds were not accompanied by a steady background noise caused by the data reduction procedure. Spoken sentences of British English, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese were subjected to this modified analysis. Confirming the earlier analysis, indeed 3–4 factors were common to these languages. The number of power-fluctuation factors needed to make noise-vocoded speech intelligible was then examined. Critical-band power fluctuations of the Japanese spoken sentences were resynthesized from the obtained factors, resulting in noise-vocoded-speech stimuli, and the intelligibility of these speech stimuli was tested by 12 native Japanese speakers. Japanese mora (syllable-like phonological unit) identification performances were measured when the number of factors was 1–9. Statistically significant improvement in intelligibility was observed when the number of factors was increased stepwise up to 6. The 12 listeners identified 92.1% of the morae correctly on average in the 6-factor condition. The intelligibility improved sharply when the number of factors changed from 2 to 3. In this step, the cumulative contribution ratio of factors improved only by 10.6%, from 37.3 to 47.9%, but the average mora identification leaped from 6.9 to 69.2%. The results indicated that, if the number of factors is 3 or more, elementary linguistic information is preserved in such noise-vocoded speech.

The Processing Cost of Scrambling and Topicalization in Japanese.

This article presents two reading comprehension experiments, using the sentence correctness decision task, that explore the causes of processing cost of Japanese sentences with SNOMOACCV, STOPOACCV, OACCSNOMV, and OTOPSNOMV word orders. The first experiment was conducted in order to see if either syntax or frequency plays a significant role in the processing of these sentences. The results of the first experiment have shown that both the structure-building process and frequency directly affect processing load. We observed that there was no difference in processing cost between SNOMOACCV and STOPOACCV, both of which are easier to process than OACCSNOMV, which is in turn easier to process than OTOPSNOMV: SNOMOACCV = STOPOACCV < OACCSNOMV < OTOPSNOMV. This result is the mixture of the two positions. Specifically, the structure building cost of STOPOACCV was neutralized by its high frequency. The aim of the second experiment was to investigate the interaction between syntactic structure, frequency, and information structure. The results showed that the processing cost of OACCSNOMV was facilitated by given-new ordering, but SNOMOACCV, STOPOACCV, and OTOPSNOMV were not. Thus, we can conclude that information structure also influences processing cost. In addition, the distribution of informational effects can be accounted for by Kuno's (1987, p. 212) Markedness Principle for Discourse Rule Violations: SNOMOACCV and STOPOACCV are unmarked/canonical options, and as such are not penalized even when they violate given-new ordering, OACCSNOMV is penalized when it does not maintain given-new ordering because it is a marked/non-canonical option, and OTOPSNOMV is penalized even when it obeys given-new ordering possibly because more specific contexts are needed. Another reason for the increased processing cost of OTOPSNOMV is a garden path effect; upon encountering OTOP of OTOPSNOMV, the parser preferentially (mis)interpreted it as STOP due to a subject-before-object preference. The revision of the interpretation may be the cause of the high processing cost observed in OTOPSNOMV.

Variability and stability in native and non-native Japanese speech

The speech of second language learners is often characterized as more variable than the speech of native speakers (e.g., Baese-Berk and Morrill, 2015; Jongman and Wade, 2007; Jongman et al., 2007; Rogerset al., 2012). However, among the relatively few studies which have examined this question directly, the majority have focused on: learners of English, learners from one L1 background, and have examined one linguistic feature per study, leaving open the possibility that non-native speech may not be more variable than native speech in all cases. The present work examines the production of Japanese sentences by native Japanese speakers, and learners of Japanese from two language backgrounds (English and Chinese). Counter to previous results, we find several cases where non-native speakers are less variable than native speakers, including on various measures of vowel spectrum variability, and voiced stop realization. Thus, the relationship between variability and language background appears to be more complex than previously thought. Accurately characterizing variability across native and non-native speech has implications for models of second language acquisition, and speech perception. We suggest that future work on variability in non-native speech should examine factors such as speakers’ L1 and L2, and multiple linguistic features.

TORITATEJOSHI BAKARI SEBAGAI PARTIKEL LIMITATIF DAN PADANANANNYA DI DALAM BAHASA INDONESIA

In Japanese toritatejoshi Bakari is a particle that shows the meaning of limitation by way of highlight an element in the sentence and shows that there is only one element of the sole, while the other elements similar omitted. Meanwhile in a Indonesian Toritatejoshi Bakari has lexical meaning 'just' and 'only'. Matching of toritatejoshi Bakari in a Indonesian language included in limitedly adverb is an adverb that describes the meaning associated with the limitation. The problem in a this paper are (1) What is the structure of a sentence that uses toritatejoshi Bakari as limiting particle in a Japanese sentences and their counterparts in a Indonesian? (2) What is the meaning of a sentence that uses toritatejoshi Bakari as limiting particle in a Japanese sentences and their counterparts in a Indonesian? (3) What is the scope of toritatejoshi Bakari as limiting particle in a Japanese sentences and their counterparts in a Indonesian?. Based on the analysis conducted, it is known appropriation of both languages. In practical terms this study are expected to be useful for foreign language speakers of Japanese in the understanding toritatejoshi fueled as barrier particles so as to assist in the Japanese language proficiency both orally and in writing and helps understanding in Indonesian

Inter-, Intra-, and Extra-Chunk Pre-Ordering for Statistical Japanese-to-English Machine Translation

A rule-based pre-ordering approach is proposed for statistical Japanese-to-English machine translation using the dependency structure of source-side sentences. A Japanese sentence is pre-ordered to an English-like order at the morpheme level for a statistical machine translation system during the training and decoding phase to resolve the reordering problem. In this article, extra-chunk pre-ordering of morphemes is proposed, which allows Japanese functional morphemes to move across chunk boundaries. This contrasts with the intra-chunk reordering used in previous approaches, which restricts the reordering of morphemes within a chunk. Linguistically oriented discussions show that correct pre-ordering cannot be realized without extra-chunk movement of morphemes. The proposed approach is compared with five rule-based pre-ordering approaches designed for Japanese-to-English translation and with a language independent statistical pre-ordering approach on a standard patent dataset and on a news dataset obtained by crawling Internet news sites. Two state-of-the-art statistical machine translation systems, one phrase-based and the other hierarchical phrase-based, are used in experiments. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the compared approaches on automatic reordering measures (Kendall’s τ, Spearman’s ρ, fuzzy reordering score, and test set RIBES) and on the automatic translation precision measure of test set BLEU score.

Contrastive Analysis of Japanese and Indonesian Passive Sentences

This study describes the similarities and differences between Japanese and Indonesian passive sentences through a pairing technique. Passive sentences in both languages are classified into several types based on their syntactic functions and categories and the semantic roles in 21 types of Japanese passive (JP) sentences and 22 types of Indonesian passive (IP) sentences. The findings show that all types of Japanese direct passive (CJ) sentences can be paired directly with the Indonesian di-V construction. Some of the Japanese indirect passive (KJ) sentences can be integrated into the constructions di-V, ter-V, ke-|-an, and construction ditinggal-V-intr, while others could not be paired with Indonesian passive sentences at all but could be expressed by active sentences with Indonesian words that convey opposing meanings. In contrast, the process of pairing Indonesian passive sentences with their Japanese counterparts indicates that type A9, personal passive, and some ter-V constructions could not be paired with Japanese passive sentences but could be expressed through active sentences by putting the object in front. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n1s1p317

Language-Non-Selective Lexical Activation without Its Use for Sentential Interpretation: An Event-Related Potential (ERP) Study on the Processing of L1 Chinese and L2 Japanese Sentences

An event-related potential (ERP) experiment was conducted to examine how native Chinese speakers with highly advanced Japanese language skills would process a sentence of a targeted language with no activation of an embedded word of an untargeted language. For the second language (L2) of Japanese in Experiment 1, three incorrect conditions were prepared for sentence correctness decisions: a Japanese sentence, including 1) a Chinese word (not existent in Japanese) semantically matched for the context, 2) a Chinese word (not existent in Japanese) semantically mismatched for the context, and 3) a nonword. For the first language (L1) of Chinese, sentences and target words were reversed (i.e., Chinese/Japanese respectively) for Experiment 2. The P200 peak appeared only for semantically mismatched L1 Chinese words embedded in L2 Japanese sentences compared to sentences containing a nonword. This P200 peak does not appear in the processing of L1 Chinese sentences compared to sentences containing a nonword. This result suggests extra attention to orthography is required at the early stage of processing. This reduces the activation of irrelevant information from the non-targeted language, in this case L1 Chinese. The N400 component was elicited in processing both L2 Japanese and L1 Chinese sentences with nonwords against L2 and L1 sentences with semantically matched and mismatched words of an untargeted language. These findings suggest that, regardless of whether there is a sentential semantic match in a targeted language, Chinese and Japanese bilinguals activate lexical concepts non-language-selectively. Although the nontargeted lexical concepts are non-selectively activated, they do not seem to be used for sentential interpretation for L2 Japanese and L1 Chinese.

A Study of Expression and Comparison of Passive Sentences in English, Chinese and Japanese

Passive sentences are important in English, Chinese and Japanese, which also serve as one of the difficulties in language acquisition. Passive sentences consist of three components: object, agent and verb. This paper makes a comparison on English, Chinese and Japanese passive sentences from those three aspects and points out the similarities and differences among them, in the hope of providing reference for the study of these three languages.

The timing of verb selection in Japanese sentence production.

Many influential models of sentence production (e.g., Bock & Levelt, 1994; Kempen & Hoenkamp, 1987; Levelt, 1989) emphasize the central role of verbs in structural encoding, and thus predict that verbs should be selected early in sentence formulation, possibly even before the phonological encoding of the first constituent (Ferreira, 2000). However, the most direct experimental test of this hypothesis (Schriefers, Teruel, & Meinshausen, 1998) found no evidence for advance verb selection in verb-final (subject-verb and subject-object-verb) utterances in German. The current study, based on a multiword picture-word interference task (Meyer, 1996; Schriefers et al., 1998), demonstrates that in Japanese, a strongly verb-final language, verbs are indeed planned in advance, but selectively before object noun articulation and not before subject noun articulation. This contrasting pattern of advance verb selection may reconcile the motivation for advance verb selection in structural encoding while explaining the previous failures to demonstrate it. Potential mechanisms that might underlie this contrasting pattern of advance verb selection are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

An event-related potential investigation of sentence processing in adults who stutter

The purpose of this study was to investigate characteristics of the semantic processing of sentences’ final verbs in stutterers using event-related potential (ERP). ERPs elicited from semantically violating and non-violating verbs in Japanese sentences were compared between 13 adults who stutter (AWS) and 13 adults who do not stutter (AWNS). The stimulus sentences elicited the N400 and the late positive component (LPC) in both groups. The amplitude of the N400, however, was attenuated in AWS. Regarding the LPC, the LPC in the 450–700ms time window (the early LPC) was evident in both groups, but the LPC in the 700–850 time window (the late LPC) was only apparent in AWS. Because AWS judged sentence congruency as accurately as AWNS did, it is assumed that AWS depended more on the LPC for semantic processing, resulting in the enhancement of the late LPC. We speculate that semantic processing of sentences for AWS is more time consuming than that for AWNS.

The Influence of Kanji Ratio and Kanji Word Length on the Impression of Japanese Sentences

The Influence of Kanji Ratio and Kanji Word Length on the Impression of Japanese Sentences

Extracting indices from Japanese legal documents

This article addresses the problem of automatically extracting legal indices which express the important contents of legal documents. Legal indices are not limited to single-word keywords and compound-word (or phrase) keywords, they are also clause keywords. We approach index extraction using structural information of Japanese sentences, i.e. chunks and clauses. Based on the assumption that legal indices are composed of important tokens from the documents, extracting legal indices is treated as a problem of collecting chunks and clauses that contain as many important tokens as possible. Each token is assigned a weight which is a statistical score, e.g. TF---IDF and Okapi BM25, to indicate its importance. The importance of a chunk or clause is determined based on the average weight of tokens included in that chunk or clause. Then, highly weighted chunks and clauses are recognized as the indices for legal documents. The experimental results on Japanese National Pension Act data show that our proposed method achieves better performance (8.6 % higher on F1-score) than TextRank, the most popular unsupervised method in extracting single-word and compound-word keywords. In addition, this approach is also applicable to extract clause keywords with high performance.

Memory disruption by irrelevant noise-vocoded speech: Effects of native language and the number of frequency bands.

To investigate the mechanisms by which unattended speech impairs short-term memory performance, speech samples were systematically degraded by means of a noise vocoder. For experiment 1, recordings of German and Japanese sentences were passed through a filter bank dividing the spectrum between 50 and 7000 Hz into 20 critical-band channels or combinations of those, yielding 20, 4, 2, or just 1 channel(s) of noise-vocoded speech. Listening tests conducted with native speakers of both languages showed a monotonic decrease in speech intelligibility as the number of frequency channels was reduced. For experiment 2, 40 native German and 40 native Japanese participants were exposed to speech processed in the same manner while trying to memorize visually presented sequences of digits in the correct order. Half of each sample received the German, the other half received the Japanese speech samples. The results show large irrelevant-speech effects increasing in magnitude with the number of frequency channels. The effects are slightly larger when subjects are exposed to their own native language. The results are neither predicted very well by the speech transmission index, nor by psychoacoustical fluctuation strength, most likely, since both metrics fail to disentangle amplitude and frequency modulations in the signals.

Individual interaction between hearing and speaking due to aging

It is well known that a hearing loss is induced by aging in a high frequency range. It is easy to imagine that the aging also alters characteristics of voice, because you can roughly estimate the speaker’s age. In general, those aging phenomena are discussed independently. In speech communication, however, the speech chain [Dense & Pinson, 1993] must dominate the interaction on the aging effects between hearing and speaking. Individual interaction between them is investigated using both his pure-tone audiometry test threshold and his recordings of read utterances. In this study, 21 Japanese elderly males, whose ages ranged from 62 to 85 years old, participated in pure tone audiometry and recording of Japanese sentence and word utterances. Concerning three elderlies with presbycusis, who are aware of hearing loss in daily lives, hearing abilities gradually decrease in proportion to frequency over 2 kHz, and spectral energies increase in the high frequency range over 4.5 kHz. In another case of high-frequency deafness, the spectral energy over 4.5 kHz increases significantly. On the other hand, elderly speakers with normal hearing do not cause energy lift of speech in high frequencies.

Negative structure and object movement in Japanese

This paper investigates negative structure in Japanese. The scope of Japanese negation appears to be narrower than that of English, which has led to different treatment of Japanese and English negation in the literature. I propose an analysis that maintains the same negative structure for Japanese and English. I demonstrate that all the scope facts regarding negative sentences in Japanese can be accounted for if we assume obligatory object movement into the TP-domain in Japanese, that is, the difference between Japanese and English is not the structural position of negation but the existence of this obligatory object movement in Japanese. The analysis also involves a discussion of scopal properties of certain elements such as focused or disjunctive phrases, which play a crucial role to determine the position of objects. Then I argue that the obligatory object movement in Japanese is driven by the need for accusative Case-particle licensing, on the basis of the observation that objects without a Case-particle are generally immobile in Japanese. I show that this analysis leads to a new perspective on A-scrambling in Japanese.

Persistence of Initial Misanalysis With No Referential Ambiguity.

Previous research reported that in processing structurally ambiguous sentences comprehenders often preserve an initial incorrect analysis even after adopting a correct analysis following structural disambiguation. One criticism is that the sentences tested in previous studies involved referential ambiguity and allowed comprehenders to make inferences about the initial interpretation using pragmatic information, suggesting the possibility that the initial analysis persisted due to comprehenders' pragmatic inference but not to their failure to perform complete reanalysis of the initial misanalysis. Our study investigated this by testing locally ambiguous relative clause sentences in Japanese, in which the initial misinterpretation contradicts the correct interpretation. Our study using a self-paced reading technique demonstrated evidence for the persistence of the initial analysis with this structure. The results from an eye-tracking study further suggested that the phenomenon directly reflected the amount of support given to the initial incorrect analysis prior to disambiguating information: The more supported the incorrect main clause analysis was, the more likely comprehenders were to preserve the analysis even after the analysis was falsified. Our results thus demonstrated that the preservation of the initial analysis occurs not due to referential ambiguities but to comprehenders' difficulty to fully revise the highly supported initial interpretation.

Linguistic Elements Association with the Presence of Particle WA and GA in Japanese Sentences and Their Indonesian Translation

&lt;p&gt;This title of this paper is &lt;em&gt;Linguistic Elements Association with the Presence of particle WA and GA in Japanese Sentences&lt;/em&gt;. The method used in this research is descriptive with distributional study technique of deletion, substitution, and &lt;em&gt;insertion&lt;/em&gt;. I apply theories from Nitta (2009) of &lt;em&gt;shudai &lt;/em&gt;(topic) and &lt;em&gt;kaisetsu &lt;/em&gt;(comment). The aim of this paper is to analyze the linguistic elements associated with presence of &lt;em&gt;WA &lt;/em&gt;and &lt;em&gt;GA &lt;/em&gt;particles. This paper shows that linguistic elements associated with the presence of &lt;em&gt;WA &lt;/em&gt;and &lt;em&gt;GA &lt;/em&gt;particles discussed in this research are subject, object for certain predicates, and topic. By examining linguistic elements associated with the particles, Indonesian Japanese language learners will be able to understand the problematic WA and GA particles usage in Japanese sentences.&lt;/p&gt;