Japanese-speaking Children Research Articles

Linguistic factors associated with stuttering-like disfluencies in Japanese preschool and school-aged children who stutter

IntroductionStuttering is influenced by different linguistic factors, such as sentence- and word-level factors. However, its developmental differences remain unclear. Thus, this study examined the developmental differences in the linguistic factors associated with stuttering-like disfluencies (SLD) among Japanese preschool and school-aged children who stutter. MethodsWe analyzed utterances from 30 Japanese-speaking children who stutter aged 5–10 years. Participants were divided into three groups according to their age (5–6, 7–8, and 9–10 years old). ResultsSignificant effects of sentence length, bunsetsu length, syllable weight, and bi-mora frequency on SLD frequency were observed across the age groups. In contrast, there was not a significant effect of mora frequency on SLD frequency. ConclusionsBoth sentence- and word-level factors affected SLD in children who stutter aged 5–10 years. Future research should be conducted with children below 5 years of age to observe detailed developmental differences in the linguistic factors that affect stuttering.

Quantitatively Measuring Developmental Characteristics in the Use of Deictic Verbs for Japanese-Speaking Children: A Pilot Study

The acquisition of deictic verbs is a significant milestone in language development. This complex process requires an understanding of the interplay between the personal pronouns “I/you” and deictic verbs. Although demonstrating the cognitive processes associated with deictic shifting through data is valuable, research issues regarding data accuracy and the spatial arrangement of the self and other remain unresolved. This pilot study aimed to quantitatively measure the body movements of Japanese-speaking children during their utterances of “come/go”. Twelve typically developing children aged 6–7 participated in this study. Multiple scenarios were set up where the researcher presented phrases using “come/go” with deictic gestures, such as moving one’s upper body forward or backward, and the participant replied with “come/go”. When performing a role, the researcher sat face-to-face or side-by-side with the participant, depending on the type of question–response. It is possible that there is a learning process whereby verbal responses using “come/go” align with corresponding body movements in the specific question type. This process is deeply involved in the development of perspective-taking abilities. Future research with relatively large samples and cross-cultural comparisons is warranted to deepen the understanding of this linguistic acquisition process and its implications.

Cognitive Factors Affecting Oral Reading Speed in Japanese-Speaking Children with Developmental Dyslexia

Cognitive Factors Affecting Oral Reading Speed in Japanese-Speaking Children with Developmental Dyslexia

Comprehension of active, passive, and causative sentences by Japanese-speaking children with intellectual disabilities and typical development

ABSTRACT This study aimed to identify the comprehension strategies employed for active, passive, and causative sentences and the involvement of phonological memory, which is a subsystem of working memory, in the comprehension skills of Japanese-speaking children with intellectual disability (ID) compared to those with typical development (TD). The participants were 29 children with ID and 18 children with TD who were matched according to mental and vocabulary ages and phonological memory scores. A picture selection method was employed as a sentence comprehension task. The stimulus sentences were grouped into four patterns of word order: subject (S) – object (O) – verb (V), OSV, SV, and OV. For example, in active sentences, the subject and object are assigned to agent and patient, respectively. The results indicated that children in both groups made comprehension errors for sentences that lacked information regarding the agent and sentences in which the two-noun sequence inverts the typical agent – patient or instructor – instructed order. Phonological memory’s involvement in sentence comprehension varied according to the combination of participant groups, sentence types, and patterns. The results suggest that both children with ID and TD relied on agent bias, whereby children consider the first noun to denote the actor and a word order strategy of interpreting a sequence of two noun phrases followed by the transitive verb as agent – patient – act. Furthermore, phonological memory underpins understanding of the relationships among arguments, particularly in the case of sentences for which agent bias or word order strategy may result in misinterpretation.

On the L1 acquisition of recursive no in Japanese

AbstractThis article investigates the emergence of recursive DPs in child language. In certain languages, DP modification can be achieved via diverse structures and any number of different embedding markers (prepositions, particles, case-marker, etc.), each having to be learned; this diversity may impact the L1 development of recursive DP modification. Japanese, in contrast, relies on two uniform unrestricted strategies: the adnominal particle の (no) or a relative clause. We report the results of an elicited production study comparing the production of recursive DPs in Japanese-speaking children and adults. Our results show that Japanese children were much like adults in the types of semantic modificational relations that elicited the most target responses. Children were different from adults in that they were: a) much less successful overall, and b) they preferred no, independently of whether the condition was biased toward no. We review the implications of these findings for analyses of no.

Japanese pitch-accent identification accuracy by children with autism spectrum disorder

A previous study demonstrated when Japanese speakers hear sine-wave speech carrying no fundamental frequency information, they rely on the first formant frequency for their pitch-accent perception, resulting in poor identification accuracy. However, when sine-wave speech is noise-vocoded, each formant becomes less audible, and Japanese speakers use other acoustic cues (e.g., duration and intensity), leading to better identification [Y. Shinohara, “Japanese pitch-accent perception of noise-vocoded sine-wave speech,” The 183rd Meeting of ASA, Nashville, TN (2022)]. The present study examined pitch-accent perception by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) for the same three stimulus types: natural recordings, sine-wave speech, and noise-vocoded sine-wave speech. Children with ASD often have enhanced auditory pitch perception for non-speech stimuli. However, since the present study used a pitch-accent word identification task, it was hypothesized that Japanese-speaking children with ASD would show less identification accuracy for all three stimulus types compared to age-matched typically developing children. Our preliminary results showed a significant difference in identification accuracy between the two groups. A detailed analysis of the results and the acoustic features of each stimulus type will be discussed.

Learning conversational dependency: Children's response using un in Japanese.

This study investigates how Japanese-speaking children learn interactional dependencies in conversations that determine the use of un, a token typically used as a positive response for yes-no questions, backchannel, and acknowledgement. We hypothesise that children learn to produce un appropriately by recognising different types of cues occurring in the immediately preceding turns. We built a set of generalised linear models on the longitudinal conversation data from seven children aged 1 to 5 years and their caregivers. Our models revealed that children not only increased their un production, but also learned to attend relevant cues in the preceding turns to understand when to respond by producing un. Children increasingly produced un when their interlocutors asked a yes-no question or signalled the continuation of their own speech. These results illustrate how children learn the probabilistic dependency between adjacent turns, and become able to participate in conversational interactions.

Maternal passives addressed to Japanese-speaking children: A usage-based approach

This study examined Japanese-speaking mothers’ passives in the child-directed speech from the CHILDES database. We selected five parent–child corpora and analyzed the overall distribution of the mothers’ passives and further investigated the contribution of the construction and the passivized verbs to sentence meaning. The findings were as follows: (1) There are only a few verbs that accounted for much of the mothers’ passives; (2) mothers’ passives can be categorized into broad classes based on the verb–patient relation; and (3) most of the passives, both direct and indirect, were used to denote adversative meaning and these negative passives collocated with the verbal auxiliary - shimau. We suggest that analyses of child-directed speech should take into account lexical repetition and the semantic redundancy of language as part of a process designed to support language development. Furthermore, highly frequent exemplar passives and their discrete reference in the events and contexts may be facilitative for children’s learning of Japanese passives. The results are evaluated in light of the usage-based proposal of learning.

Comprehension of Null and Pronominal Object Sentences in Japanese-speaking Children

ABSTRACT In successful communication, it is critical to have the ability to identify what a speaker is referring to from previously mentioned information. This ability requires the identification of the topic initially introduced by lexical forms and its continuity in discourse expressed by anaphora such as null and pronominal forms in the subsequent sentences. While Japanese-speaking children are frequently provided with pronominal and null forms, especially the null form, in reference to previously mentioned topics, it remains unclear from what age they understand the anaphoric use of such referential forms. The current study investigated the age at which Japanese-speaking children are able to identify the presence of topic chains connecting null and pronoun anaphora to the topic referred to by a lexical form in the preceding sentence. We tested children’s comprehension of null and pronominal object sentences using an intermodal preferential-looking paradigm. The results demonstrated that the Japanese-speaking children aged 2;7 and 3;2 as a group looked at the target animation reliably longer after hearing the test sentences than before or during the test sentences. This finding provides evidence that Japanese-speaking children’s ability to track topic chains and understand anaphora in the discourse develop by 2;7 years of age. However, unlike the 3;2-year-old group, the 2;7-year-old group showed weaker performance in interpreting pronominal object sentences, suggesting a possibility that young children find the interpretation of null anaphora easier than that of pronoun anaphora.

Examining the simple view of reading in a hybrid orthography

We examined the developmental relationships between oral language skills (vocabulary, morphological awareness), word reading, and reading comprehension in the hybrid orthography of Japanese, where two contrastive scripts (syllabic Hiragana, morphographic Kanji) are used simultaneously. Participants were 191 Japanese-speaking children followed from Grade 2 to Grade 4. Results from a latent variable model showed that Kanji character recognition, but not Hiragana word reading fluency, predicted reading comprehension after controlling for the effects of nonverbal IQ, phonological awareness, and oral language skills. Moreover, oral language skills predicted reading comprehension both directly and indirectly through Kanji character recognition. These findings support the premises of the Simple View of Reading model in the hybrid orthography of Japanese and suggest that the characteristics of script children learn can moderate the associations between the model’s components.

Speech rate development in Japanese-speaking children and proficiency in mora-timed rhythm

Development of speech rate is often reported as children exhibiting reduced speech rates until they reach adolescence. Previous studies have investigated the developmental process of speech rate using global measures (syllables per second, syllables per minute, or words per minute) and revealed that development continues up to around 13 years of age in several languages. However, the global measures fail to capture language-specific characteristics of phonological/prosodic structure within a word. The current study attempted to examine the developmental process of speech rate and language-specific rhythm in an elicited production task. We recorded the speech of Japanese-speaking monolingual participants (18 participants each in child [5-, 7-, 9-, 11-, and 13-year-old] and adult groups), who pronounced three types of target words: two-mora, two-syllable words (CV.CV); three-mora, two-syllable words (CVV.CV); and three-mora, three-syllable words (CV.CV.CV), where C is consonant and V is vowel. We analyzed total word duration and differences in two pairs of word types: a pair of three-mora words (to show the effect of syllables) and a pair of two-syllable words (to show the effect of moras). The results revealed that Japanese-speaking children have acquired adult-like word duration before 11 years of age, whereas the development of rhythmical timing control continues until approximately 13 years of age. The results also suggest that the effect of syllables for Japanese-speaking children aged 9 years or under was stronger than that of moras, whereas the effect of moras was stronger after 9 years of age, indicating that the default unit for children in speech rhythm may be the syllable even when the language is mora-based.

Increased Behavioral Sensitivity to Repeated Experiences of Punishment in Children With ADHD: Experimental Studies Using the Matching Law

Background: Research on altered motivational processes in ADHD has focused on reward. The sensitivity of children with ADHD to punishment has received limited attention. We evaluated the effects of punishment on the behavioral allocation of children with and without ADHD from the United States, New Zealand, and Japan, applying the generalized matching law. Methods: Participants in two studies (Furukawa et al., 2017, 2019) were 210 English-speaking (145 ADHD) and 93 Japanese-speaking (34 ADHD) children. They completed an operant task in which they chose between playing two simultaneously available games. Rewards became available every 10 seconds on average, arranged equally across the two games. Responses on one game were punished four times as often as responses on the other. The asymmetrical punishment schedules should bias responding to the less punished alternative. Results: Compared with controls, children with ADHD from both samples allocated significantly more responses to the less frequently punished game, suggesting greater behavioral sensitivity to punishment. For these children, the bias toward the less punished alternative increased with time on task. Avoiding the more punished game resulted in missed reward opportunities and reduced earnings. English-speaking controls showed some preference for the less punished game. The behavior of Japanese controls was not significantly influenced by the frequency of punishment, despite slowed response times after punished trials and immediate shifts away from the punished game, indicating awareness of punishment. Conclusion: Punishment exerted greater control over the behavior of children with ADHD, regardless of their cultural background. This may be a common characteristic of the disorder. Avoidance of punishment led to poorer task performance. Caution is required in the use of punishment, especially with children with ADHD. The group difference in punishment sensitivity was more pronounced in the Japanese sample; this may create a negative halo effect for children with ADHD in this culture.

Audiovisual English /r/-/l/ Identification Training for Japanese-Speaking Adults and Children.

Purpose This study tested the hypothesis that audiovisual training benefits children more than it does adults and that it improves Japanese-speaking children's English /r/-/l/ perception to a native-like level. Method Ten sessions of audiovisual English /r/-/l/ identification training were conducted for Japanese-speaking adults and children. Assessments were made of age effects on the increase in identification accuracy in three testing conditions (audiovisual, visual only, and audio only) and auditory discrimination of the primary acoustic cue (F3 frequency). Results The results showed that both adults and children increased their identification accuracy in the audiovisual condition more than in the single-modality conditions (visual only and audio only). Their improvement in the visual-only condition was larger than that in the audio-only condition. Japanese-speaking adults and children improved their primary acoustic cue (F3) sensitivity to a similar extent. In addition, their identification improvement in the audiovisual condition was positively correlated with those in the audio-only and visual-only conditions. The improvement in the audio-only condition was also positively correlated with that in the visual-only condition and with primary acoustic cue sensitivity. Conclusion It was unclear whether children had an advantage over adults in improving their identification accuracy, but both age groups improved their auditory and visual perception of the English /r/-/l/ contrast and showed additive effects in the multisensory (i.e., audiovisual) condition.

Relative Clause Sentence Comprehension by Japanese-Speaking Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment.

Purpose This study investigated the auditory comprehension of Japanese sentences including relative clauses (RCs) by 52 Japanese-speaking children with typical development (TD) and 16 children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method A picture-pointing task measured RC and main clause (MC) comprehension for object and subject relatives in sentences with varying lengths. The accuracy of RC only, MC only, and combined comprehension (RC and MC) was analyzed with linear mixed-effects (logistic) models to examine accuracy and the effects of the deep gap-filler distance (structural complexity), the surface linear distance, and sentence length for the two participant groups. Six language tests and two working memory tests were administered to determine language and working memory status. A factor analysis grouped them into two factors that were examined as predictors of comprehension performance. Results Initial models indicated that children with SLI performed more poorly than their peers with TD. Working memory abilities predicted the comprehension of subject and object relative sentences, but language abilities other than a general measure of sentence comprehension were only limited predictors. In a series of pairwise comparisons, children with SLI did not exhibit comprehension facilitation for RC sentences with lower structural complexity, nor did they exhibit comprehension facilitation when the linear distance between the gap and the filler was shorter, perhaps because of their overall lower performance. Children with TD made more errors on sentences with higher structural complexity but did not exhibit any linear distance effects. Neither group exhibited effects of noun phrase or sentence length. Conclusions Japanese-speaking children with TD exhibited negative comprehension effects of increased deep structure complexity, but not of linear surface distance or sentence noun phrase length. The children with SLI face challenges in comprehending both subject and object relative sentences compared to their typically developing peers. Their poorer working memory abilities are the primary factor that constrains their performance.

Learning difficulties in Japanese schoolchildren with focal epilepsy

BackgroundChildren with epilepsy often show some degree of cognitive impairment. In this study, we investigated their learning skills to clarify the characteristics of the difficulties related to learning in Japanese-speaking children with focal epilepsy. MethodsThe study included 13 boys and 17 girls of mean age 9.7 years (standard deviation 2.61; range 6–14 years) with focal epilepsy and a normal magnetic resonance brain scan. None of the patients had any other neurological disorder. ResultsTwenty-two children had “learning difficulties”, i.e., an intellectual disability or low scores on a learning abilities task. Significant differences were found in age (P = 0.030), age at onset of epilepsy (P = 0.033), and electroencephalographic findings, as well as between bilateral vs. unilateral (P = 0.028) and right-localized vs. left-localized or bilateral (P = 0.014) involvement between subjects with and without learning difficulties. Seven (88%) of eight children with low scores on a learning abilities task showed abnormalities in reading speed. DiscussionMore than half of Japanese-speaking children with focal epilepsy need learning assistance. This finding points to a need for learning support in children with focal epilepsy regardless of language. Measurement of reading speed is useful in children with learning difficulties to identify those who require early intervention.

Exploring the acquisition of verb inflections in Japanese: A probabilistic analysis of seven adult–child corpora

The acquisition of verb morphology is often studied using categorical criteria for determining the productivity of a morpheme. Applying this approach to Japanese, an agglutinative language, this study finds no consistent order for morpheme acquisition and that productivity could be explained by sampling effects. To examine morpheme acquisition using more graded measures of productivity, the authors compared various regression models for predicting the age of acquisition of 311 verb forms across a large combined corpus of seven Japanese-speaking children (aged 1;1–5;1). Complex forms were learned earlier than frequency-matched simple forms, and morpheme ending identity explained substantial variation. Both of these findings suggest that children have some segmented morphemes and have learned some of their semantic/pragmatic characteristics. Sampling would predict that verb form acquisition would be sensitive to lemma and ending frequency, but acquisition was also sensitive to aspects of input frequency that were independent of these factors, and this suggests that children are encoding whole verb forms in addition to creating forms with compositional morphological rules.

Acquisition of the Meaning of the Word Orange Requires Understanding of the Meanings of Red, Pink, and Purple: Constructing a Lexicon as a Connected System.

This research investigated how children build up the language-specific system of the color lexicon, examining factors that play important roles for the construction of an adult-like color lexicon. We had 3-, 4-, and5-year-old Japanese-speaking children and adults (n=20, 18, 19, and 19, respectively) produce names for 93 color swatches. The results showed that children of all ages were able to apply most of the chromatic words to the colors close to the center of each category, but even 5-year-olds struggle to delineate the boundaries between the words. Furthermore, the model analyses revealed that broad-covering and high-frequency words are mapped to the center of the lexical category earlier. However, cross-individual consistency in adults' use contributed most strongly for the adult-like boundary delineation. The results suggest that the process of system construction consists of at least two steps (i.e., mapping words to their category center and finding appropriate boundaries between neighboring words), with the quantity and the quality of the input contributing differently to the steps.

Crosslinguistic Differences in the Encoding of Causality: Transitivity Preferences in English and Japanese Children and Adults

ABSTRACTLanguages differ in how they encode causal events, placing greater or lesser emphasis on the agent or patient of the action. Little is known about how these preferences emerge and the relative influence of cognitive biases and language-specific input at different stages in development. In these studies, we investigated the emergence of sentence preferences to describe causal events in English- and Japanese-speaking children (aged three and five years) and compared this to preferences displayed by adults. We studied two factors suggested to influence this choice: Language (Corpus study & Experiment 1) and Intentionality (Experiment 2). Participants watched videos depicting familiar and novel causal actions, and made a best-match choice between a transitive and intransitive description. We found a stronger preference for intransitive sentences with causal verbs and more frequent argument omissions in Japanese child-directed speech than in English child-directed speech. The trajectory of acquisition in the selection of transitive sentences for causal events differed between languages. For intentionality, with familiar verbs both Japanese and English speakers selected fewer transitives for accidental than intentional scenes, but this pattern was more pronounced in Japanese speakers. However, with novel verbs, only five-year-olds and adults showed this preference. These data provide important new information to constrain theories about the process of learning to map event structure to language, and its interdependence with intentionality and the distributional properties of linguistic input to children.

Syntactic development in children with intellectual disabilities - using structured assessment of syntax.

Children with intellectual disabilities (IDs) have a severe delay in syntactic development compared with other language abilities. This study investigated conditions of syntactic development in native Japanese-speaking children with ID. Children with ID [N=51; 18 autism spectrum disorders (ASD), 18 Down syndrome (DS) and 15 ID without ASD and DS] were compared with typically developing children (N=78) with the same mental age (MA). The development of syntax in spoken language was examined by receptive and production tasks. The development of syntax in children with ID was significantly delayed than in typically developing children with the same MA. However, when reaching the MA of 7-9, syntax abilities started to develop remarkably. Moreover, children with ASD had significant difficulties in acquiring passive voice, whereas children with DS showed a significant delay in syntactic development. The development of syntax in children with ID might be affected by MA and the type of disability. Moreover, it is necessary to exceed an MA of 7-9years for children with ID to develop syntax abilities.

Young children’s multimodal participation in storytelling

In what ways do young children use talk and gesture to participate in conversational storytelling with family members? This paper addresses this question by examining the interactions between Japanese-speaking children (ages one year and ten months to two years and five months) and their parents at the dining table. In focusing on children’s use of talk and gesture in inhabiting the dynamic and shifting roles of ‘recipient’ and ‘speaker’, the analysis shows how children (1) display their understanding of parents’ tellings and (2) animate the activities, social actions, and stances of characters (self and other). It also shows how parents respond to children’s talk and gesture, through practices such as alignment, assessment and repair. The findings shed light on children’s multimodal participation in conversational storytelling, and their abilities to engage in action and make relevant contributions to interaction.