Tomohiko Ito

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN GRAMMATICAL AND LEXICAL DEVELOPMENT IN JAPANESE SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT: A CASE STUDY

Differences Between Grammatical and Lexical Development in Japanese Specific Language Impairment: A Case Study Paradis and Gopnik (1997) and Fukuda and Fukuda (2001a, b) suggested that the performance of children with specific language impairment (SLI) could be explained by deficits in their knowledge of grammar, whereas their lexicon appears to be intact. The purpose of this study was to examine this hypothesis with longitudinal data from a Japanese child with SLI from the ages of 9 to 14. Tests with tense, passives, case-marking, demonstrative pronouns and vocabulary were administered during this period. The results were as follows. The participants lexical age developed rapidly. In contrast, the percent correct of her passives did not increase significantly from the ages of 9 to 14. Moreover, the percent correct on tense was 50% at the age of 14 when non-words were used. In case-marker production with passives, it was 50% even at the age of 14 when reversed word order was used. However, the percent correct of demonstrative pronouns was 50% at the age of 11, and it increased rapidly to 100% within a year. The results of this study provide further empirical support for the hypothesis that the deficit in children with SLI can be attributed to an impairment in their grammatical knowledge which seems to spare their lexicon.

The transition from the core vowels to the following segments in Japanese children who stutter: The second, third and fourth syllables

, Syllable weight and phonological encoding in Japanese children who stutter. Japanese Journal of Special Education, 44, 451–462; 2008, Syllable weight and frequency of stuttering: Comparison between children who stutter with and without a family history of stuttering. Japanese Journal of Special Education, 45, 437–445; 2009, Difference in frequency of stuttering between light and heavy syllables in the production of monosyllables: From the viewpoint of phonetic transition. The Japanese Journal of Logopedics and Phoniatrics, 50, 116–122 (in Japanese)) proposed the hypothesis that in Japanese the transition from the core vowels (CVs) to the following segments affected the occurrence of stuttering. However, the transition we investigated was in the first syllables only, and the effect of the transition in second, third and fourth syllables was not addressed. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the transition from the CVs in the second, third and fourth syllables affected the occurrence of stuttering. The participants were 21 Japanese children. A non-word naming task and a non-word reading task were used. The frequency of stuttering was not significantly different where the number of transitions from the CVs differed on either task. These results suggest that the transition from the CVs in the second, third and fourth syllables does not have a significant effect on the occurrence of stuttering in Japanese.

Effect of word accent on the difficulty of transition from core vowels in first syllables to the following segments in Japanese children who stutter

Abstract Matsumoto-Shimamori, Ito, Fukuda, and Fukuda (2011) proposed the hypothesis that the transition from the core vowel (i.e. syllable nucleus) in the first syllable of a word to the following segment significantly affects the occurrence of stuttering in Japanese. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether word accent (i.e. an abrupt pitch fall in Japanese) affects the production difficulty of the transition from the core vowel in the first syllable of a word to the following segment in Japanese. The participants were 25 Japanese children who stuttered, ranging in age from 6;4 to 12;5. A two- and three-syllable word naming task was used. The frequency of stuttering was not significantly different between the words with and without an abrupt pitch fall, and among those whose positions of an abrupt pitch fall were different. These results suggest that word accent does not have a significant effect on the difficulty of the transition from the core vowel in the first syllable of a word in Japanese.

Grammatical case-marking in Japanese children with SLI

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to investigate whether or not Japanese children with specific language impairment (henceforth; SLI) would in fact experience difficulty with grammatical case-marking. The participants were 10 Japanese children with SLI, aged 7;7 to 11;4, and 25 Japanese children with typical language development (henceforth; TLD), aged 8;11 to 9;11. In this study, a sentence completion task was used, which involved both active and passive sentences with canonical and scrambled word order. The children with SLI were significantly less accurate than those with TLD with the use of grammatical case-markers. Moreover, the majority of the errors that the children with SLI made with case-marking consisted of canonical case-marking patterns. These results suggest that Japanese children with SLI do in fact appear to experience difficulty with grammatical case-marking and furthermore that they seem to rely on canonical case-marking patterns to compensate for their deficits.

Segmental transition of the first syllables of words in Japanese children who stutter: Comparison between word and sentence production

ABSTRACT Matsumoto-Shimamori, Ito, Fukuda, & Fukuda (2011) proposed the hypothesis that in Japanese, the transition from the core vowels (i.e. syllable nucleus) of the first syllables of words to the following segments affected the occurrence of stuttering. Moreover, in this transition position, an inter-syllabic transition precipitated more stuttering than an intra-syllabic one (Shimamori & Ito, 2007, 2008). However, these studies have only used word production tasks. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the same results could be obtained in sentence production tasks. Participants were 28 Japanese school-age children who stutter, ranging in age from 7;3 to 12;7. The frequency of stuttering on words with an inter-syllabic transition was significantly higher than on those having an intra-syllabic transition, not only in isolated words but in the first words of sentences. These results suggested that Matsumoto et al.’s hypothesis could be applicable to the results of sentence production tasks.