Shogo Makioka

Frequency of occurrence for units of phonemes, morae, and syllables appearing in a lexical corpus of a Japanese newspaper

On the basis of the lexical corpus created by Amano and Kondo (2000), using theAsahi newspaper, the present study provides frequencies of occurrence for units of Japanese phonemes, morae, and syllables. Among the five vowels, /a/ (23.42%), /i/ (21.54%), /u/ (23.47%), and /o/ (20.63%) showed similar frequency rates, whereas /e/ (10.94%) was less frequent. Among the 12 consonants, /k/ (17.24%), /t/ (15.53%), and /r/ (13.11%) were used often, whereas /p/ (0.60%) and /b/ (2.43%) appeared far less frequently. Among the contracted sounds, /sj/ (36.44%) showed the highest frequency, whereas /mj/ (0.27%) rarely appeared. Among the five long vowels, /ar/ (34.4%) was used most frequently, whereas /ur/ (12.11%) was not used so often. The special sound /n/ appeared very frequently in Japanese. The syllable combination /k/+V+/n/ (19.91%) appeared most frequently among syllabic combinations with the nasal /n/. The geminate (or voiceless obstruent) /q/, when placed before the four consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, and /s/, appeared 98.87% of the time, but the remaining 1.13% did not follow the definition. The special sounds /r/, /n/, and /q/ seem to appear very frequently in Japanese, suggesting that they are notspecial in terms of frequency counts. The present study further calculated frequencies for the 33 newly and officially listed morae/syllables, which are used particularly for describing alphabetic loanwords. In addition, the top 20 bi-mora frequency combinations are reported. Files of frequency indexes may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Web archive athttp://www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

New figures for a Web-accessible database of the 1,945 basic Japanese kanji, fourth edition.

On the basis of calculations using the latest lexical database produced by Amano and Kondo (2000), the fourth edition of a Web-accessible database of characteristics of the 1,945 basic Japanese kanji was produced by including the mathematical concepts ofentropy, redundancy, andsymmetry and by replacing selected indexes found in previous editions (Tamaoka, Kirsner, Yanase, Miyaoka, & Kawakami, 2002). The kanji database in the fourth edition introduces seven new figures for kanji characteristics: (1) printed frequency, (2) lexical productivity, (3) accumulative lexical productivity, (4) symmetry for lexical productivity, (5) entropy, (6) redundancy, and (7) numbers of meanings for On-readings and Kun-readings. The file of the fourth edition of the kanji database may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Web archive,http://www.psychonomics.org/archive/.

Japanese Mental Syllabary and Effects of Mora, Syllable, Bi-mora and Word Frequencies on Japanese Speech Production

The present study investigated the existence of a Japanese mental syllabary and units stored therein for speech production. Experiment 1 compared naming latencies between high and low initial mora frequencies using CVCVCV nonwords, indicating that nonwords with a high initial mora frequency were named faster than those with a low frequency initial mora. Experiments 2 and 3 clarified the possibility of CV light and CVN/CVR heavy syllables as being units implicated in speech production. CVNCV nonwords in Experiment 2 and CVRCV nonwords in Experiment 3 displayed shorter naming latencies and lower error rates than their baseline (same bi-mora frequencies) of CVCVCV-structured nonwords. Since bi-mora frequencies between CVN/CVR and CVCV were the same, heavy syllables comprised of CVN and CVR units may contribute to ready-made motor-programs stored in the Japanese mental syllabary as variations of the 100 core light syllables (300 units in total). Experiment 4 further tested the effects of bi-mora frequency on the naming of nonwords, and found that CVCVCV-structured nonwords with high bi-mora frequencies were named more quickly and accurately than those with low bi-mora frequencies, although some bi-mora combinations seem to exhibit nonconforming tendencies (i.e., null significance in item analysis). Experiment 5 demonstrated that the naming of real words with high word frequency was quicker than for other real word conditions with low word frequencies (i.e., word frequency effects), with little effect of bi-mora frequencies. Unlike the nonword condition of Experiment 4, bi-mora frequency had only a minor influence on the naming of real words. Based on these findings, the present study proposes a possible model of the Japanese mental syllabary accompanied by a discussion of bi-mora and word frequency effects.

Serial order learning of subliminal visual stimuli: evidence of multistage learning.

It is widely known that statistical learning of visual symbol sequences occurs implicitly (Kim et al., 2009). In this study, we examined whether people can learn the serial order of visual symbols when they cannot detect them. During the familiarization phase, triplets or quadruplets of novel symbols were presented to one eye under continuous flash suppression (CFS). Perception of the symbols was completely suppressed by the flash patterns presented to the other eye [binocular rivalry (BR)]. During the test phase, the detection latency was faster for symbols located later in the triplets or quadruplets. These results indicate that serial order learning occurs even when the participants cannot detect the stimuli. We also found that detection became slower for the last item of the triplets or quadruplets. This phenomenon occurred only when the participants were familiarized with the symbols under CFS, suggesting that the subsequent symbols interfered with the processing of the target symbol when conscious perception was suppressed. We further examined the nature of the interference and found that it occurred only when the subsequent symbol was not fixed. This result suggests that serial order learning under BR is restricted to fixed order sequences. Statistical learning of the symbols’ transition probability might not occur when the participants cannot detect the symbols. We confirmed this hypothesis by conducting another experiment wherein the transition probability of the symbol sequence was manipulated.

On the dynamics of the compounding of Japanese kanji with common and proper nouns

Abstract The present study examines the dynamics of the kanji combinations that form common (or general) and proper nouns in Japanese. The following three results were obtained. First, the degree of distribution results from two similar processes which are based on a steady-state of birth-and-death processes with different birth and death rates, resulting in a positive negative binomial distribution with the proper nouns and in a positive Waring distribution with common nouns. Second, all rank-frequency distributions follow the negative hypergeometric distribution used very frequently in ranking problems. Third, the building of kanji compounds follows a dissortative strategy. The higher the outdegree of a kanji, the more it prefers kanji with lower indegrees. A linear dependence can be observed with common nouns, whereas the relationship between compounded kanji is rather curvilinear with proper nouns. The actual analytical expression is not yet known.

A Connectionist Model of Phonological Working Memory

We propose a connectionist model that can learn the pronunciation of words by imitation. The model “hears” the pronunciation of words (sequences of phonemes) and develops a static internal representation of phonology. It then tries to reproduce the pronunciation from the internal representation. We trained the model to imitate the pronunciation of 3,684 English monosyllabic words. After 15 million training trials, the network achieved a 99.2% correct response. To simulate the process of the serial recall of words or nonwords, we added a subsystem called a temporary maintenance module. This module preserves the phonological internal representation by using a Hebbian one-shot algorithm to transform the activation pattern to a connection pattern. The model could reproduce the effect of the phonotactic probability on a serial recall task done by human children. The result of the simulation implies that our model can explain the effect of long-term memory on the phonological working memory.