Kiyoshi Otomo

Asymmetrical mismatch negativity in humans as determined by phonetic but not physical difference.

A two-tone oddball procedure was employed to examine the effect of a phonemic category on the mismatch negativity (MMN). One of the stimuli was a phoneme prototype of Japanese /e/, and the other, [e/ö], which was perceived by Japanese participants as showing deviance from typicality but is nonetheless included in the category /e/. As control stimuli, a pair of pure tones (1940 and 1794 Hz), corresponding to the F2 frequencies of /e/ and [e/ö], respectively, was presented within the same oddball procedure. The MMN for deviant [e/ö] revealed greater amplitude than that of deviant /e/, although there was no significant difference in amplitude between the pure tones. The results suggest that a phonemic category determines the auditory sensory memory.

Maternal responses to word approximations in Japanese children's transition to language

Verbal/vocal interactions of three Japanese mother-child dyads were examined when the children were 1;0, 1;2 to 1;3, 1;6 to 1;7, and 1;8 to 1;9 to determine whether mothers provide information which may facilitate the elaboration of child lexical forms during the transition from the prelinguistic to the linguistic period. Mothers were likely to reproduce only the childs word-like utterances, both well- and ill-formed. This provided an opportunity for the childs ill-formed word-like utterance to be contrasted with an immediate maternal response. This finding, along with results showing within-child variability of lexical forms, suggested that maternal contrastive replies 1) signal errors to the child (cf. Saxton, 1997), and 2) may promote the childs selection and stabilization of production alternatives which are more accurate. Maternal reproductive responding presumably originated in their tendency to seek content-oriented communication, as was reflected in mothers growing inclination to continue verbal interactions following the childs non-word-like vocalizations.

Developmental Sentence Scoring for Japanese

This article reports on the development and use of the Developmental Sentence Scoring for Japanese (DSSJ), a new morpho-syntactical measure for Japanese constructed after the model of Lee’s English Developmental Sentence Scoring model. Using this measure, the authors calculated DSSJ scores for 84 children divided into six age groups between 2;8 and 5;2 on the basis of 100-sentence samples collected from free-play child–adult conversations. The analysis showed a high correlation of the DSSJ overall score with the Mean Length of Utterance. The analysis of the DSSJ sub-area scores revealed large variations between these sub-area scores for children with similar overall DSSJ scores. When investigating the high-scoring children (over 1 SD over group average), most children scored high in three to five sub-areas, but the combination of scores for these sub-areas varied from child to child. It is concluded that DSSJ is a valuable tool especially for language acquisition research. The overall DSSJ score reliably reflects the overall morpho-syntactic development of Japanese children, and the sub-area scores provide specific information on individual acquisition patterns.

Phonetically determined asymmetry of the mismatch negativity in Japanese

Abstract The effect of a phonetic category in Japanese on the mismatch negativity (MMN) was examined by using a two-tone “oddball” procedure. One of the stimuli was a phoneme prototype of Japanese [e] and the other, [e/o], which is perceived by Japanese speakers as showing deviance from typicality but is nonetheless included in the category [e]. In the first session, one of the two stimuli was presented as the standard and the other as the deviant. In the second session, the probability of both stimuli was reversed. As control stimuli, a pair of pure tones (1940 and 1794 Hz) corresponding to the F 2 frequencies of [e] and [e/o], respectively, were presented within the same oddball paradigm. The MMN for deviant [e/o] revealed greater amplitude and shorter latency than that of deviant [e]. In contrast, there was no significant difference in the amplitude or latency between the pure tones. The results suggest that a phonetic category determines the sensory memory processing in the auditory modality.

Some issues of Japanese speech-language-hearing therapy education.

Recent trends in Japanese speech-language-hearing (SLH) therapy education are reported. The rapid growth of educational institutions has continued since our last report. The educational curriculum was established by the 1997 certification of Japanese SLH therapists, and is strictly applied to educating both college/university and vocational school students. Over 1,000 students annually become registered SLH therapists, of whom nearly 70% are under the age of 39 years. More therapists are employed full time to serve the adult population, while a limited number of therapists are fully employed to provide services to children. As a member of the economically more advanced nations, Japan receives assistance from foreign workers coming from economically less developed nations. Their children face the difficult tasks of learning both their mother tongue and Japanese. There is a strong need for our profession to assist the early language acquisition of these children because their cognitive and personal development will be greatly influenced by adequate language acquisition. An appeal is made to our colleagues for sharing the mutual tasks of bringing about better linguistic and communicative development in those educationally disadvantaged children.