A growing number of studies suggest cultural differences in the attention and evaluation of information in adults (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Hedden, Ketay, Aron, Markus, & Gabrieli, 2008). One cultural comparison, between Westerners, such as Americans, and Easterners, such as the Japanese, suggest that Westerners typically focus on a central single object in a scene while...

Head-Internal Relatives (HIRs) in Japanese are regarded as rich context-setters within Dynamic Syntax (DS): the propositional tree of the HIR clause is mapped onto a ‘partial’ tree, which establishes a rich context for the embedding clause to be parsed. This partial tree contains a situation node decorated with the Relevancy restriction and a node for an internal head. This account handles some...

...although PPP lessons are often supplemented with skills lessons, most students taught mainly through conventional approaches such as PPP leave school unable to communicate effectively in English (Stern, 1983). This situation has prompted many ELT professionals to take note of... second language acquisition (SLA) studies... and turn towards holistic approaches where meaning is central and whe...

This paper studies the ambiguity reduction ability of the probabilistic contextfree grammar. We theoretically analyze the common behavior of any probabilistic context-free grammar. Moreover, we con rm by experiments that a probabilistic context-free grammar learnt from Japanese corpus has the ambiguity reduction ability as expected by the theoretical analysis.

Two studies tested the hypothesis that in judging people's emotions from their facial expressions, Japanese, more than Westerners, incorporate information from the social context. In Study 1, participants viewed cartoons depicting a happy, sad, angry, or neutral person surrounded by other people expressing the same emotion as the central person or a different one. The surrounding people's emoti...

It is very difficult for the overseas students to learn Japanese polite expression (JPE) during their course of learning the Japanese language. In this paper, in order to support the foreigners learning JPEs anywhere anytime, we propose a ubiquitous language-learning environment which works without any input of the context information. In the traditional Japanese class, learners only learn the ...

This paper studies the influence of prosodic features, context, and word order on the identification of focused clauses in Japanese dialogue, using a psychoacoustic experiment. In the experiment, question and answer speech was used as stimuli. The questions were to create two different contexts in the stimuli, and the answers had focal prominence at different clauses and had different word orde...

This study examined the processing of two types of Japanese causative cleft constructions (subject-gap vs. object-gap) by conducting an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment to clarify the processing mechanism of long-distance dependencies. The results demonstrated that the subject-gap constructions elicited larger P600 effects compared with object-gap constructions. Based on these fin...