We investigate children’s online predictive processing as it occurs naturally, in conversation. We showed 1–7 year-olds short videos of improvised conversation between puppets, controlling for available linguistic information through phonetic manipulation. Even oneand two-year-old children made accurate and spontaneous predictions about when a turn-switch would occur: they gazed at the upcoming...

We have constructed two research resources of Japanese lexical simplification. One is a simplification system that supports reading comprehension of a wide range of readers, including children and language learners. The other is a dataset for evaluation that enables open discussions with other systems. Both the system and the dataset are made available providing the first such resources for the...

For sentence compression, we propose new semantic constraints to directly capture the relations between a predicate and its arguments, whereas the existing approaches have focused on relatively shallow linguistic properties, such as lexical and syntactic information. These constraints are based on semantic roles and superior to the constraints of syntactic dependencies. Our empirical evaluation...

A perceptual discrimination test was conducted to investigate whether humans can discriminate prosodic types solely based on suprasegmental acoustic cues. Excerpts from Chinese, English, Spanish, and Japanese, differing in lexical accent types and rhythm types, were used. From these excerpts, “source” signals of the source-filter model, differing in F0, intensity, and HNR, were created and used...

Drug Package Leaflets provide information for patients on how to safely use medicines. European Commission and recent studies stress that further efforts must be made to improve the readability and understandability of package leaflets in order to ensure the proper use of medicines and to increase patient safety. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that directly deals with the ...