Utako Minai

What Hinders Child Semantic Computation: Children's Universal Quantification and the Development of Cognitive Control.

Recent studies on the acquisition of semantics have argued that knowledge of the universal quantifier is adult-like throughout development. However, there are domains where children still exhibit non-adult-like universal quantification, and arguments for the early mastery of relevant semantic knowledge do not explain what causes such non-adult-like interpretations. The present study investigates Japanese four- and five-year-old childrens atypical universal quantification in light of the development of cognitive control. We hypothesized that childrens still-developing cognitive control contributes to their atypical universal quantification. Using a combined eye-tracking and interpretation task together with a non-linguistic measure of cognitive control, we revealed a link between the achievement of adult-like universal quantification and the development of flexible perspective-switch. We argue that the development of cognitive control is one of the factors that contribute to childrens processing of semantics.

The Role of the Focus Operator Only in Children's Computation of Sentence Meaning

Research on childrens computation of meanings involving the focus operator only has provided an equivocal conclusion as to whether childrens semantic representation of only is adult-like. The present study discusses the importance of assessing childrens knowledge about only in light of its semantic interaction with other logical words in a sentence. The meaning of only involves two components, each of which affects the interpretation of another logical word, such as the scalar term some, in a sentence containing only. Demonstrating that young children are sensitive to the interaction among only and some would suggest that children possess adult-like knowledge of the lexical semantics of only. We report a new experiment that examines childrens interpretation of sentences involving only and some, revealing that children indeed do not ignore the contribution of only when interpreting sentences with only and some.

Fetal rhythm-based language discrimination: a biomagnetometry study

Using fetal biomagnetometry, this study measured changes in fetal heart rate to assess discrimination of two rhythmically different languages (English and Japanese). Two-minute passages in English and Japanese were read by the same female bilingual speaker. Twenty-four mother–fetus pairs (mean gestational age=35.5 weeks) participated. Fetal magnetocardiography was recorded while the participants were presented first with passage 1, a passage in English, and then, following an 18 min interval, with passage 2, either a different passage in English (English–English condition: N=12) or in Japanese (English–Japanese condition: N=12). The fetal magnetocardiogram was reconstructed following independent components analysis decomposition. The mean interbeat intervals were calculated for a 30 s baseline interval directly preceding each passage and for the first 30 s of each passage. We then subtracted the mean interbeat interval of the 30 s baseline interval from that of the first 30 s interval, yielding an interbeat interval change value for each passage. A significant interaction between condition and passage indicated that the English–Japanese condition elicited a more robust interbeat interval change for passage 2 (novelty phase) than for passage 1 (familiarity phase), reflecting a faster heart rate during passage 2, whereas the English–English condition did not. This effect indicates that fetuses are sensitive to the change in language from English to Japanese. These findings provide the first evidence for fetal language discrimination as assessed by fetal biomagnetometry and support the hypothesis that rhythm constitutes a prenatally available building block in language acquisition.

Children’s Demonstrative Comprehension and the Role of Non-linguistic Cognitive Abilities: A Cross-Linguistic Study

Previous studies have shown that young children often fail to comprehend demonstratives correctly when they are uttered by a speaker whose perspective is different from children’s own, and instead tend to interpret them with respect to their own perspective (e.g., Webb and Abrahamson in J Child Lang 3(3):349–367, 1976); Clark and Sengul in J Child Lang 5(3):457–475, 1978). In the current study, we examined children’s comprehension of demonstratives in English (this and that) and Mandarin Chinese (zhe and na) in order to test the hypothesis that children’s non-adult-like demonstrative comprehension is related to their still-developing non-linguistic cognitive abilities supporting perspective-taking, including Theory of Mind and Executive Function. Testing 3 to 6-year-old children on a set of demonstrative comprehension tasks and assessments of Theory of Mind and Executive Function, our findings revealed that children’s successful demonstrative comprehension is related to their development of Theory of Mind and Executive Function, for both of the language groups. These findings suggest that the development of deictic expressions like demonstratives may be related to the development of non-linguistic cognitive abilities, regardless of the language that the children are acquiring.

Context-Sensitivity and Individual Differences in the Derivation of Scalar Implicature

The derivation of scalar implicatures for the quantifier some has been widely studied to investigate the computation of pragmatically enriched meanings. For example, the sentence “I found some books” carries the semantic interpretation that at least one book was found, but its interpretation is often enriched to include the implicature that not all the books were found. The implicature is argued to be more likely to arise when it is relevant for addressing a question under discussion (QUD) in the context, e.g., when “I found some books” is uttered in response to “Did you find all the books?” as opposed to “Did you find any books?”. However, most experimental studies have not examined the influence of context on some, instead testing some sentences in isolation. Moreover, no study to our knowledge has examined individual differences in the ability to utilize context in interpreting some, whereas individual variation in deriving implicatures for some sentences in isolation is widely attested, with alternative proposals attributing this variation to individual differences in cognitive resources (e.g., working memory) or personality-based pragmatic abilities (e.g., as assessed by the Autism-Spectrum Quotient). The current study examined how context influences the interpretation of some in a story-sentence matching task, where participants rated some statements (“I cut some steaks”) uttered by one character, in response to another character’s question (QUD) that established the implicature as relevant (“Did you cut all the steaks?”) or irrelevant (“Did you cut any steaks?”). We also examined to what extent individuals’ sensitivity to QUD is modulated by individual differences via a battery of measures assessing cognitive resources, personality-based pragmatic abilities, and language abilities (which have been argued to modulate comprehension in other domains). Our results demonstrate that QUD affects the interpretation of some, and reveal that individual differences in sensitivity to QUD are modulated by both cognitive resources and personality-based pragmatic abilities. While previous studies have argued alternatively for cognitive resources or personality-based pragmatic abilities as important for deriving implicatures for some in isolation, we argue that arriving at a context-sensitive interpretation for some depends on both cognitive and personality-based properties of the individual.

Comprehension of mimetics by adult native speakers of Japanese

Linguistics traditionally regards the relationship between a word’s sound and its meaning as arbitrary; words which systematically relate sound and meaning – ‘sound-symbolic’ or ‘mimetic’ words – have been regarded as peripheral (Imai and Kita, 2014); however, increasingly, research has found that languages such as Japanese have highly developed and grammatically integrated lexical strata devoted to mimetic words (Hamano, 1998; Tsujimura, 2001, 2005; Tsujimura and Deguchi, 2003). In Japanese, Akita (2010) has posited that among mimetics that denote internal states (‘psychomimes’), three categories can be identified based on semantic, morphosyntactic, and syntactic properties. With respect to syntax, Akita proposes that compatibility with locus noun phrases constitutes a syntactic constraint on these mimetic classes’ naturalness that can serve to discriminate the three classes. In this experiment, we sought to find empirical evidence for this claim by way of native speakers’ judgment of the naturalness of mimetics in sentences according to a five-point scale. Our results provided empirical support for Akita’s claim, indicating that her categorization might indeed be a psychological reality for native speakers of Japanese.

Children's Knowledge of Structure-Dependent Semantic Interactions between Logical Words.

ABSTRACT The current study examined preschool children’s ability to evaluate the entailment patterns yielded by sentences containing two downward entailing (DE) operators, every and no. When no precedes every, the entailment pattern typically licensed by every changes, but only if no also c-commands every in the hierarchical structure of the sentence. While children had been shown to be sensitive to the effect of a preceding and c-commanding negation on every, it had not been shown whether children were sensitive to the c-command relation between these elements or simply to their linear order. We demonstrate that children’s evaluation of the entailment patterns engendered by sentences with no and every makes recourse to hierarchical structural representations. These findings run counter to models positing that young children lack such representations and instead suggest that young children possess both detailed syntactic representations and knowledge of logical operators such as no and every.

Acquisition and Use of Linguistic Knowledge: Scrambling in Child Japanese as a Test Case

The current study investigates preschool-age children’s comprehension of scrambled sentences in Japanese. While scrambling has been known to be challenging for children, biasing them to exhibit non-adult-like interpretations (e.g., Hayashibe in Descr Appl Linguist 8:1–18, 1975; Sano in Descr Appl Linguist 10:213–233, 1977; Suzuki in Jpn J Educ Psychol 25(3):56–61, 1977), children are able to interpret scrambled sentences in an adult-like way when the pragmatics is enriched in the experiments (Otsu in Acquisition studies in generative grammar, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp 253–264, 1994). These findings suggest that children’s difficulty in comprehending scrambling may be due to processing difficulties (Suzuki in J Psycholinguist Res 42(2), 119–137, 2013), such as the Lexical-ordering Strategy bias (Bever in Cognition and language development, Wiley, New York, pp 279–352, 1970), rather than their lack of the linguistic knowledge of scrambling. The current study revealed that children are indeed able to utilize prosodic information to interpret scrambled sentences in an adult-like way. Our findings provide converging evidence in favor of the proposal that children’s grammatical knowledge of scrambling is intact, although they are more vulnerable than adults to processing difficulties that hinder their ability to successfully interpret scrambled sentences.

Assessing Preschool Children’s Knowledge of Compounds from a Logico- Semantic Perspective

Research in First Language Acquisition investigates three broad questions: What do children know about language? When does this knowledge emerge? How is children’s knowledge of language different from adults’ knowledge of language? This study adds to previous research in FLA by investigating the interaction between logic and meaning in child language. This study examines preschool children’s comprehension of the logical relation between a compound and its head noun in comparison to adult’s logico-semantic interpretation of compounds.