Scholars@Duke
Reiko Mazuka

Reiko Mazuka CV

Research Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
Psychology & Neuroscience
mazuka@duke.edu
Duke Box 90085, Durham, NC 27708-0085
323 Soc-Psych, Durham, NC
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Selected Publications

Lack of early sensitivity and gradual emergence of native phoneme categories: A pattern from underrepresented language learners.

Journal Article Developmental science · September 2024 Perceptual narrowing of speech perception supposes that young infants can discriminate most speech sounds early in life. During the second half of the first year, infants' phonetic sensitivity is attuned to their native phonology. However, supporting evide ... Full text Cite

Diversity and representation in studies of infant perceptual narrowing

Journal Article Child Development Perspectives · December 1, 2022 Over the past 50 years, scientists have made amazing discoveries about the origins of human language acquisition. Central to this field of study is the process by which infants' perceptual sensitivities gradually align with native language structure, known ... Full text Cite

Speech rate development in Japanese-speaking children and proficiency in mora-timed rhythm.

Journal Article Journal of experimental child psychology · August 2022 Development of speech rate is often reported as children exhibiting reduced speech rates until they reach adolescence. Previous studies have investigated the developmental process of speech rate using global measures (syllables per second, syllables per mi ... Full text Cite

Language specificity in cortical tracking of speech rhythm at the mora, syllable, and foot levels.

Journal Article Scientific reports · August 2022 Recent research shows that adults' neural oscillations track the rhythm of the speech signal. However, the extent to which this tracking is driven by the acoustics of the signal, or by language-specific processing remains unknown. Here adult native listene ... Full text Cite

How much does prosody help word segmentation? A simulation study on infant-directed speech.

Journal Article Cognition · February 2022 Infants come to learn several hundreds of word forms by two years of age, and it is possible this involves carving these forms out from continuous speech. It has been proposed that the task is facilitated by the presence of prosodic boundaries. We revisit ... Full text Cite

Development of allophonic realization until adolescence: A production study of the affricate-fricative variation of /z/ among Japanese children

Conference Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH · January 1, 2022 The development of allophonic variants of phonemes is poorly understood. Thus, this study aimed to examine when children typically begin to articulate a phoneme with the same allophonic variant typically used by adults. Japanese children aged 5-13 years an ... Full text Cite

Developmental differences in the hemodynamic response to changes in lyrics and melodies by 4- and 12-month-old infants.

Journal Article Cognition · August 2021 Songs and speech play central roles in early caretaker-infant communicative interactions, which are crucial for infants' cognitive, social, and emotional development. Compared to speech development, however, much less is known about how infants process son ... Full text Cite

Does Infant-Directed Speech Help Phonetic Learning? A Machine Learning Investigation.

Journal Article Cognitive science · May 2021 A prominent hypothesis holds that by speaking to infants in infant-directed speech (IDS) as opposed to adult-directed speech (ADS), parents help them learn phonetic categories. Specifically, two characteristics of IDS have been claimed to facilitate learni ... Full text Cite

How vocal temporal parameters develop: A comparative study between humans and songbirds, two distantly related vocal learners

Journal Article Journal of Language Evolution · January 1, 2021 Human infants acquire motor patterns for speech during the first several years of their lives. Sequential vocalizations such as human speech are complex behaviors, and the ability to learn new vocalizations is limited to only a few animal species. Vocaliza ... Full text Cite

Prosodic Bootstrapping

Chapter · January 1, 2021 This chapter covers theoretical frameworks and experimental findings showing that young infants are already sensitive to language prosody prenatally and can use it to learn about the lexical and morphosyntactic features of their native language(s). Specifi ... Full text Cite

When context is and isn't helpful: A corpus study of naturalistic speech.

Journal Article Psychonomic bulletin & review · August 2020 Infants learn about the sounds of their language and adults process the sounds they hear, even though sound categories often overlap in their acoustics. Researchers have suggested that listeners rely on context for these tasks, and have proposed two main w ... Full text Cite

Communicative cues in the absence of a human interaction partner enhance 12-month-old infants' word learning.

Journal Article Journal of experimental child psychology · March 2020 Is infants' word learning boosted by nonhuman social agents? An on-screen virtual agent taught infants word-object associations in a setup where the presence of contingent and referential cues could be manipulated using gaze contingency. In the study, 12-m ... Full text Cite

Developmental Changes in the Utilization of Referential Visual Context during Sentence Comprehension: Eye Movement and Pupil Dilation Evidence from Children and Adults

Journal Article Language Learning and Development · January 1, 2019 This study investigated age differences in the utilization of visually contrastive information (i.e., differently colored identical objects) for temporary referential ambiguity resolution during spoken sentence comprehension. Five- and 6-year-old Japanese ... Full text Cite

Nasal consonant discrimination in infant- And adult-directed speech

Conference Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH · January 1, 2019 Infant-directed speech (IDS) is thought to play a facilitating role in language acquisition, by simplifying the input infants receive. In particular, the hypothesis that the acoustic level is enhanced to make the input more clear for infants, has been exte ... Full text Cite

Are Words Easier to Learn From Infant- Than Adult-Directed Speech? A Quantitative Corpus-Based Investigation.

Journal Article Cognitive science · May 2018 We investigate whether infant-directed speech (IDS) could facilitate word form learning when compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). To study this, we examine the distribution of word forms at two levels, acoustic and phonological, using a large database ... Full text Cite

Development of fricative sound perception in Korean infants: The role of language experience and infants' initial sensitivity.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2018 In this paper, we report data on the development of Korean infants' perception of a rare fricative phoneme distinction. Korean fricative consonants have received much interest in the linguistic community due to the language's distinct categorization of sou ... Full text Cite

How to use context to disambiguate overlapping categories: The test case of Japanese vowel length

Conference Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2018 · January 1, 2018 Infants learn the sound categories of their language and adults successfully process the sounds they hear, even though sound categories often overlap in their acoustics. Most researchers agree that listeners use context to disambiguate overlapping categori ... Cite

Alpha band event-related desynchronization underlying social situational context processing during irony comprehension: A magnetoencephalography source localization study.

Journal Article Brain and language · December 2017 Irony comprehension requires integration of social contextual information. Previous studies have investigated temporal aspects of irony processing and its neural substrates using psychological/electroencephalogram or functional magnetic resonance imaging m ... Full text Cite

Exploiting Pitch Accent Information in Compound Processing: A Comparison between Adults and 6- to 7-Year-Old Children

Journal Article Language Learning and Development · October 2, 2017 A noun can be potentially ambiguous as to whether it is a head on its own, or is a modifier of a Noun + Noun compound waiting for its head. This study investigates whether young children can exploit the prosodic information on a modifier constituent preced ... Full text Cite

Lack of early sensitivity and gradual emergence of native phoneme categories: A pattern from underrepresented language learners.

Journal Article Developmental science · September 2024 Perceptual narrowing of speech perception supposes that young infants can discriminate most speech sounds early in life. During the second half of the first year, infants' phonetic sensitivity is attuned to their native phonology. However, supporting evide ... Full text Cite

Diversity and representation in studies of infant perceptual narrowing

Journal Article Child Development Perspectives · December 1, 2022 Over the past 50 years, scientists have made amazing discoveries about the origins of human language acquisition. Central to this field of study is the process by which infants' perceptual sensitivities gradually align with native language structure, known ... Full text Cite

Speech rate development in Japanese-speaking children and proficiency in mora-timed rhythm.

Journal Article Journal of experimental child psychology · August 2022 Development of speech rate is often reported as children exhibiting reduced speech rates until they reach adolescence. Previous studies have investigated the developmental process of speech rate using global measures (syllables per second, syllables per mi ... Full text Cite

Language specificity in cortical tracking of speech rhythm at the mora, syllable, and foot levels.

Journal Article Scientific reports · August 2022 Recent research shows that adults' neural oscillations track the rhythm of the speech signal. However, the extent to which this tracking is driven by the acoustics of the signal, or by language-specific processing remains unknown. Here adult native listene ... Full text Cite

How much does prosody help word segmentation? A simulation study on infant-directed speech.

Journal Article Cognition · February 2022 Infants come to learn several hundreds of word forms by two years of age, and it is possible this involves carving these forms out from continuous speech. It has been proposed that the task is facilitated by the presence of prosodic boundaries. We revisit ... Full text Cite

Development of allophonic realization until adolescence: A production study of the affricate-fricative variation of /z/ among Japanese children

Conference Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH · January 1, 2022 The development of allophonic variants of phonemes is poorly understood. Thus, this study aimed to examine when children typically begin to articulate a phoneme with the same allophonic variant typically used by adults. Japanese children aged 5-13 years an ... Full text Cite

Developmental differences in the hemodynamic response to changes in lyrics and melodies by 4- and 12-month-old infants.

Journal Article Cognition · August 2021 Songs and speech play central roles in early caretaker-infant communicative interactions, which are crucial for infants' cognitive, social, and emotional development. Compared to speech development, however, much less is known about how infants process son ... Full text Cite

Does Infant-Directed Speech Help Phonetic Learning? A Machine Learning Investigation.

Journal Article Cognitive science · May 2021 A prominent hypothesis holds that by speaking to infants in infant-directed speech (IDS) as opposed to adult-directed speech (ADS), parents help them learn phonetic categories. Specifically, two characteristics of IDS have been claimed to facilitate learni ... Full text Cite

How vocal temporal parameters develop: A comparative study between humans and songbirds, two distantly related vocal learners

Journal Article Journal of Language Evolution · January 1, 2021 Human infants acquire motor patterns for speech during the first several years of their lives. Sequential vocalizations such as human speech are complex behaviors, and the ability to learn new vocalizations is limited to only a few animal species. Vocaliza ... Full text Cite

Prosodic Bootstrapping

Chapter · January 1, 2021 This chapter covers theoretical frameworks and experimental findings showing that young infants are already sensitive to language prosody prenatally and can use it to learn about the lexical and morphosyntactic features of their native language(s). Specifi ... Full text Cite

When context is and isn't helpful: A corpus study of naturalistic speech.

Journal Article Psychonomic bulletin & review · August 2020 Infants learn about the sounds of their language and adults process the sounds they hear, even though sound categories often overlap in their acoustics. Researchers have suggested that listeners rely on context for these tasks, and have proposed two main w ... Full text Cite

Communicative cues in the absence of a human interaction partner enhance 12-month-old infants' word learning.

Journal Article Journal of experimental child psychology · March 2020 Is infants' word learning boosted by nonhuman social agents? An on-screen virtual agent taught infants word-object associations in a setup where the presence of contingent and referential cues could be manipulated using gaze contingency. In the study, 12-m ... Full text Cite

Developmental Changes in the Utilization of Referential Visual Context during Sentence Comprehension: Eye Movement and Pupil Dilation Evidence from Children and Adults

Journal Article Language Learning and Development · January 1, 2019 This study investigated age differences in the utilization of visually contrastive information (i.e., differently colored identical objects) for temporary referential ambiguity resolution during spoken sentence comprehension. Five- and 6-year-old Japanese ... Full text Cite

Nasal consonant discrimination in infant- And adult-directed speech

Conference Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH · January 1, 2019 Infant-directed speech (IDS) is thought to play a facilitating role in language acquisition, by simplifying the input infants receive. In particular, the hypothesis that the acoustic level is enhanced to make the input more clear for infants, has been exte ... Full text Cite

Are Words Easier to Learn From Infant- Than Adult-Directed Speech? A Quantitative Corpus-Based Investigation.

Journal Article Cognitive science · May 2018 We investigate whether infant-directed speech (IDS) could facilitate word form learning when compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). To study this, we examine the distribution of word forms at two levels, acoustic and phonological, using a large database ... Full text Cite

Development of fricative sound perception in Korean infants: The role of language experience and infants' initial sensitivity.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2018 In this paper, we report data on the development of Korean infants' perception of a rare fricative phoneme distinction. Korean fricative consonants have received much interest in the linguistic community due to the language's distinct categorization of sou ... Full text Cite

How to use context to disambiguate overlapping categories: The test case of Japanese vowel length

Conference Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2018 · January 1, 2018 Infants learn the sound categories of their language and adults successfully process the sounds they hear, even though sound categories often overlap in their acoustics. Most researchers agree that listeners use context to disambiguate overlapping categori ... Cite

Alpha band event-related desynchronization underlying social situational context processing during irony comprehension: A magnetoencephalography source localization study.

Journal Article Brain and language · December 2017 Irony comprehension requires integration of social contextual information. Previous studies have investigated temporal aspects of irony processing and its neural substrates using psychological/electroencephalogram or functional magnetic resonance imaging m ... Full text Cite

Exploiting Pitch Accent Information in Compound Processing: A Comparison between Adults and 6- to 7-Year-Old Children

Journal Article Language Learning and Development · October 2, 2017 A noun can be potentially ambiguous as to whether it is a head on its own, or is a modifier of a Noun + Noun compound waiting for its head. This study investigates whether young children can exploit the prosodic information on a modifier constituent preced ... Full text Cite

Vowels in infant-directed speech: More breathy and more variable, but not clearer.

Journal Article Cognition · September 2017 Infant-directed speech (IDS) is known to differ from adult-directed speech (ADS) in a number of ways, and it has often been argued that some of these IDS properties facilitate infants' acquisition of language. An influential study in support of this view i ... Full text Cite

Age-Dependent Effects of Catechol-O-Methyltransferase (COMT) Gene Val158Met Polymorphism on Language Function in Developing Children.

Journal Article Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · January 2017 The genetic basis controlling language development remains elusive. Previous studies of the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) Val158Met genotype and cognition have focused on prefrontally guided executive functions involving dopamine. However, COMT may f ... Full text Cite

Emergence of Japanese infants' prosodic preferences in infant-directed vocabulary.

Journal Article Developmental psychology · January 2017 The article examines the role of infant-directed vocabulary (IDV) in infants language acquisition, specifically addressing the question of whether IDV forms that are not prominent in adult language may nonetheless be useful to the process of acquisition. J ... Full text Cite

The Effects of Lexical Pitch Accent on Infant Word Recognition in Japanese.

Journal Article Frontiers in psychology · January 2017 Learners of lexical tone languages (e.g., Mandarin) develop sensitivity to tonal contrasts and recognize pitch-matched, but not pitch-mismatched, familiar words by 11 months. Learners of non-tone languages (e.g., English) also show a tendency to treat pitc ... Full text Cite

The role of prosody and speech register in word segmentation: A computational modelling perspective

Conference ACL 2017 - 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference (Long Papers) · January 1, 2017 This study explores the role of speech register and prosody for the task of word segmentation. Since these two factors are thought to play an important role in early language acquisition, we aim to quantify their contribution for this task. We study a Japa ... Full text Cite

Utterances in infant-directed speech are shorter, not slower.

Journal Article Cognition · November 2016 It has become a truism in the literature on infant-directed speech (IDS) that IDS is pronounced more slowly than adult-directed speech (ADS). Using recordings of 22 Japanese mothers speaking to their infant and to an adult, we show that although IDS has an ... Full text Cite

Learnability of prosodic boundaries: Is infant-directed speech easier?

Journal Article The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · August 2016 This study explores the long-standing hypothesis that the acoustic cues to prosodic boundaries in infant-directed speech (IDS) make those boundaries easier to learn than those in adult-directed speech (ADS). Three cues (pause duration, nucleus duration, an ... Full text Cite

Language-general biases and language-specific experience contribute to phonological detail in toddlers' word representations.

Journal Article Developmental psychology · March 2016 Although toddlers in their 2nd year of life generally have phonologically detailed representations of words, a consistent lack of sensitivity to certain kinds of phonological changes has been reported. The origin of these insensitivities is poorly understo ... Full text Cite

Referential ambiguity resolution in sentence comprehension: A developmental study measuring eye movements and pupil dilation

Journal Article Japanese Journal of Educational Psychology · January 1, 2016 The present study investigated whether adults and 5-and 6-year-old children could incrementally resolve referential ambiguity of adjective-noun phrases in Japanese. Using a visual world paradigm, the experiment examined whether the proportion of participan ... Full text Cite

Constructing the corpus of infant-directed speech and infant-like robot-directed speech

Conference HAI 2015 - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction · October 21, 2015 The characteristics of the spoken language used to address infants have been eagerly studied as a part of the language acquisition research. Because of the uncontrollability factor with regard to the infants, the features and roles of infantdirected speech ... Full text Cite

Infant-directed speech as a window into the dynamic nature of phonology

Conference Laboratory Phonology · October 1, 2015 Theoretical frameworks of phonology are built largely on the basis of idealized speech, typically recorded in a laboratory under static conditions. Natural speech, in contrast, occurs in a variety of communicative contexts where speakers and hearers dynami ... Full text Cite

The acoustic salience of prosody trumps infants' acquired knowledge of language-specific prosodic patterns.

Journal Article Journal of memory and language · July 2015 There is mounting evidence that prosody facilitates grouping the speech stream into syntactically-relevant units (e.g., Hawthorne & Gerken, 2014; Soderstrom, Kemler Nelson, & Jusczyk, 2005). We ask whether prosody's role in syntax acquisition relates to it ... Full text Cite

Predicting the unbeaten path through syntactic priming.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · March 2015 A number of previous studies showed that comprehenders make use of lexically based constraints such as subcategorization frequency in processing structurally ambiguous sentences. One piece of such evidence is lexically specific syntactic priming in compreh ... Full text Cite

Predictive processing of novel compounds: evidence from Japanese.

Journal Article Cognition · March 2015 Our study argues that pre-head anticipatory processing operates at a level below the level of the sentence. A visual-world eye-tracking study demonstrated that, in processing of Japanese novel compounds, the compound structure can be constructed prior to t ... Full text Cite

Mothers speak less clearly to infants than to adults: a comprehensive test of the hyperarticulation hypothesis.

Journal Article Psychological science · March 2015 Infants learn language at an incredible speed, and one of the first steps in this voyage is learning the basic sound units of their native languages. It is widely thought that caregivers facilitate this task by hyperarticulating when speaking to their infa ... Full text Cite

Even at 4 months, a labial is a good enough coronal, but not vice versa.

Journal Article Cognition · January 2015 Numerous studies have revealed an asymmetry tied to the perception of coronal place of articulation: participants accept a labial mispronunciation of a coronal target, but not vice versa. Whether or not this asymmetry is based on language-general propertie ... Full text Cite

Segmental distributions and consonant-vowel association patterns in Japanese infant- and adult-directed speech.

Journal Article Journal of child language · November 2014 Japanese infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS) were compared on their segmental distributions and consonant-vowel association patterns. Consistent with findings in other languages, a higher ratio of segments that are generally produc ... Full text Cite

The role of the input on the development of the LC bias: a crosslinguistic comparison.

Journal Article Cognition · September 2014 Previous studies have described the existence of a phonotactic bias called the Labial-Coronal (LC) bias, corresponding to a tendency to produce more words beginning with a labial consonant followed by a coronal consonant (i.e. "bat") than the opposite CL p ... Full text Cite

The multidimensional nature of hyperspeech: evidence from Japanese vowel devoicing.

Journal Article Cognition · August 2014 We investigate the hypothesis that infant-directed speech is a form of hyperspeech, optimized for intelligibility, by focusing on vowel devoicing in Japanese. Using a corpus of infant-directed and adult-directed Japanese, we show that speakers implement hi ... Full text Cite

Development of non-native vowel discrimination: Improvement without exposure.

Journal Article Developmental psychobiology · February 2014 The present study tested Japanese 4.5- and 10-month old infants' ability to discriminate three German vowel pairs, none of which are contrastive in Japanese, using a visual habituation-dishabituation paradigm. Japanese adults' discrimination of the same pa ... Full text Cite

Development of text reading in Japanese: an eye movement study

Journal Article Reading and Writing · 2014 Cite

Development of text reading in Japanese: An eye movement study

Journal Article Reading and Writing · January 1, 2014 This study examined age-group differences in eye movements among third-grade, fifth-grade, and adult Japanese readers. In Experiment 1, Japanese children, but not adults, showed a longer fixation time on logographic kanji words than on phonologically trans ... Full text Cite

Auditory observation of infant-directed speech by mothers: experience-dependent interaction between language and emotion in the basal ganglia.

Journal Article Frontiers in human neuroscience · January 2014 Adults address infants with a special speech register known as infant-directed speech (IDS), which conveys both linguistic and emotional information through its characteristic lexicon and exaggerated prosody (e.g., higher pitched, slower, and hyperarticula ... Full text Cite

The development of Japanese passive syntax as indexed by structural priming in comprehension.

Journal Article Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · January 2014 A number of previous studies reported a phenomenon of syntactic priming with young children as evidence for cognitive representations required for processing syntactic structures. However, it remains unclear how syntactic priming reflects children's gramma ... Full text Cite

Effect of repeated evaluation and repeated exposure on acceptability ratings of sentences.

Journal Article Journal of psycholinguistic research · December 2013 This study investigated the effect of repeated evaluation and repeated exposure on grammatical acceptability ratings for both acceptable and unacceptable sentence types. In Experiment 1, subjects in the Experimental group rated multiple examples of two ung ... Full text Cite

Dialectal differences in hemispheric specialization for Japanese lexical pitch accent.

Journal Article Brain and language · December 2013 Language experience can alter perceptual abilities and the neural specialization for phonological contrasts. Here we investigated whether dialectal differences in the lexical use of pitch information lead to differences in functional lateralization for pit ... Full text Cite

Phonological theory informs the analysis of intonational exaggeration in Japanese infant-directed speech.

Journal Article The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · August 2013 To date, the intonation of infant-directed speech (IDS) has been analyzed without reference to its phonological structure. Intonational phonology should, however, inform IDS research, discovering important properties that have previously been overlooked. T ... Full text Cite

Is the mora rhythm of Japanese more strongly observed in infant-directed speech than in adult-directed speech?

Journal Article J Acoust Soc Am · May 2013 Japanese has traditionally been called "mora-timed," but studies have shown that this intuition is based not on durational tendencies but rather on phonological, structural factors in the language. Meanwhile, infant-directed speech (IDS) is said to "exagge ... Full text Link to item Cite

Is the vowel length contrast in japanese exaggerated in infant-directed speech?

Journal Article Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH · January 1, 2013 Vowel length contrasts in Japanese, e.g., chizu "map" vs. chiizu "cheese", are cued primarily by vowel duration. However, since short and long vowel durations overlap considerably in ordinary speech, learning to perceive vowel length contrasts is complex. ... Cite

Learning phonemic vowel length from naturalistic recordings of Japanese infant-directed speech.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2013 In Japanese, vowel duration can distinguish the meaning of words. In order for infants to learn this phonemic contrast using simple distributional analyses, there should be reliable differences in the duration of short and long vowels, and the frequency di ... Full text Cite

Is the mora rhythm of Japanese more strongly observed in infant-directed speech than in adult-directed speech?

Journal Article Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics · 2013 Japanese has traditionally been called "mora-timed", but studies have shown that this intuition is based not on durational tendencies but rather on phonological, structural factors in the language. Meanwhile, infant-directed speech (IDS) is said to "exagge ... Full text Cite

Word frequency cues word order in adults: cross-linguistic evidence.

Journal Article Frontiers in psychology · January 2013 One universal feature of human languages is the division between grammatical functors and content words. From a learnability point of view, functors might provide entry points or anchors into the syntactic structure of utterances due to their high frequenc ... Full text Cite

The labial-coronal effect revisited: Japanese adults say pata, but hear tapa.

Journal Article Cognition · December 2012 The labial-coronal effect has originally been described as a bias to initiate a word with a labial consonant-vowel-coronal consonant (LC) sequence. This bias has been explained with constraints on the human speech production system, and its perceptual corr ... Full text Cite

The F0 fall delay of lexical pitch accent in Japanese Infant-directed speech

Conference 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association 2012, INTERSPEECH 2012 · December 1, 2012 The current study examined the acoustic modifications of the lexical pitch accent in Tokyo Japanese infant-directed speech (IDS), with the focus on the F0 fall delay, where the alignment of the F0 turning points associated with pitch accents were delayed w ... Cite

What hinders child semantic computation: children's universal quantification and the development of cognitive control.

Journal Article Journal of child language · November 2012 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 t ... Full text Cite

Immediate use of prosody and context in predicting a syntactic structure.

Journal Article Cognition · November 2012 Numerous studies have reported an effect of prosodic information on parsing but whether prosody can impact even the initial parsing decision is still not evident. In a visual world eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the influence of contrastive inton ... Full text Cite

Intonation facilitates contrast resolution: Evidence from Japanese adults and 6-year olds

Journal Article Journal of Memory and Language · January 1, 2012 Two eye-tracking experiments tested how pitch prominence on a prenominal adjective affects contrast resolution in Japanese adult and 6-year old listeners. Participants located two animals in succession on displays with multiple colored animals. In Experime ... Full text Cite

Development of single/geminate obstruent discrimination by Japanese infants: early integration of durational and nondurational cues.

Journal Article Developmental psychology · January 2012 The Japanese language has single/geminate obstruents characterized by durational difference in closure/frication as part of the phonemic repertoire used to distinguish word meanings. We first evaluated infants' abilities to discriminate naturally uttered s ... Full text Cite

“Nyuji no onsei hattatsu” (In Japanese). (Development of infant speech perception)

Journal Article The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Japan, · 2012 Cite

The multi timescale phoneme acquisition model of the self-organizing based on the dynamic features

Journal Article Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH · December 1, 2011 It is unclear as to how infants learn the acoustic expression of each phoneme of their native languages. In recent studies, researchers have inspected phoneme acquisition by using a computational model. However, these studies have used a limited vocabulary ... Cite

The development of a phonological illusion: a cross-linguistic study with Japanese and French infants.

Journal Article Developmental science · July 2011 In adults, native language phonology has strong perceptual effects. Previous work has shown that Japanese speakers, unlike French speakers, break up illegal sequences of consonants with illusory vowels: they report hearing abna as abuna. To study the devel ... Full text Cite

Optical brain imaging reveals general auditory and language-specific processing in early infant development.

Journal Article Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · February 2011 This study uses near-infrared spectroscopy in young infants in order to elucidate the nature of functional cerebral processing for speech. Previous imaging studies of infants' speech perception revealed left-lateralized responses to native language. Howeve ... Full text Cite

Individual differences in sentence processing: Effects of verbal working memory and cumulative linguistic knowledge

Conference · January 1, 2011 The present study investigates individual differences in sentence processing. The Verbal Working Memory (VWM) model and the Two Factor Model, involving VWM and Cumulative Linguistic Knowledge (CLK), are compared in three self-paced reading experiments, in ... Full text Cite

Processing of infant-directed speech by adults.

Journal Article NeuroImage · January 2011 Adults typically address infants in a special speech mode called infant-directed speech (IDS). IDS is characterized by a special prosody (i.e., higher pitched, slower and hyperarticulated) and a special lexicon ("baby talk"). Here we investigated which are ... Full text Cite

Functional lateralization of speech processing in adults and children who stutter.

Journal Article Frontiers in psychology · January 2011 Developmental stuttering is a speech disorder in fluency characterized by repetitions, prolongations, and silent blocks, especially in the initial parts of utterances. Although their symptoms are motor related, people who stutter show abnormal patterns of ... Full text Cite

Learning the sound system of Japanese: What does it tell us about language acquisition?

Journal Article 20th International Congress on Acoustics 2010, ICA 2010 - Incorporating Proceedings of the 2010 Annual Conference of the Australian Acoustical Society · December 1, 2010 Infants learn much about the phonology of their own language during the first year of their lives. To date, however, the vast majority of the research on infant speech perception has been carried out with infants learning English and other European languag ... Cite

A robust method to detect dialectal differences in the perception of lexical pitch accent

Journal Article 20th International Congress on Acoustics 2010, ICA 2010 - Incorporating Proceedings of the 2010 Annual Conference of the Australian Acoustical Society · December 1, 2010 While Standard (Tokyo) Japanese has a lexical tonal system known as 'lexical pitch accent', there are some varieties of Japanese, called 'accentless' dialects, which do not have any lexical tonal phenomena. We investigated the differences in the perception ... Cite

Development of hemispheric specialization for lexical pitch-accent in Japanese infants.

Journal Article Journal of cognitive neuroscience · November 2010 Infants' speech perception abilities change through the first year of life, from broad sensitivity to a wide range of speech contrasts to becoming more finely attuned to their native language. What remains unclear, however, is how this perceptual change re ... Full text Open Access Cite

The development of perceptual grouping biases in infancy: a Japanese-English cross-linguistic study.

Journal Article Cognition · May 2010 Perceptual grouping has traditionally been thought to be governed by innate, universal principles. However, recent work has found differences in Japanese and English speakers' non-linguistic perceptual grouping, implicating language in non-linguistic perce ... Full text Cite

The perception of non-native lexical pitch accent by speakers of 'accentless' Japanese dialects

Conference Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech Prosody · January 1, 2010 While Standard (Tokyo) Japanese has a lexical tonal system known as a system of 'lexical pitch accent', there are some varieties of Japanese, called 'accentless' dialects, which do not have any lexical tonal phenomena. We investigated how the speakers of t ... Cite

Discrimination of phonemic vowel length by Japanese infants.

Journal Article Developmental psychology · January 2010 Japanese has a vowel duration contrast as one component of its language-specific phonemic repertory to distinguish word meanings. It is not clear, however, how a sensitivity to vowel duration can develop in a linguistic context. In the present study, using ... Full text Cite

Unsupervised learning of vowels from continuous speech based on self-organized phoneme acquisition model

Journal Article Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH 2010 · January 1, 2010 All normal humans can acquire their native phoneme systems simply by living in their native language environment. However, it is unclear as to how infants learn the acoustic expression of each phoneme of their native languages. In recent studies, researche ... Cite

Learning variation of deterministic chaos in auditory signals

Journal Article Neuroscience Research · January 2010 Full text Cite

Development of executive control and language processing

Journal Article Linguistics and Language Compass · January 1, 2009 Research in executive function development has shown that children have poor control of inhibition functions, including the inhibition of prepotent responses, control of attention, and flexibility at rule-shifting. To date, links between the development of ... Full text Cite

Acquisition of linguistic-rhythm and prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis (In Japanese; Gengorizumu no kakutoku to inritsu ni yoru bootosutorappingukasetsu"

Journal Article Japanese Journal of Phonology · 2009 In the Rhythm-based Prosodic Bootstrapping Hypothesis, it is proposed that infants' early sensitivity to the rhythmic properties of a language will enable them to adopt a metrical speech segmentation strategy appropriate for their language. The proposal wa ... Cite

Bootstrapping word order in prelexical infants: a Japanese-Italian cross-linguistic study.

Journal Article Cognitive psychology · August 2008 Learning word order is one of the earliest feats infants accomplish during language acquisition [Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.]. Two theories have been proposed to account for this fact. Cons ... Full text Cite

Effects of verbal working memory and cumulative linguistic knowledge on reading comprehension

Journal Article Japanese Psychological Research · March 1, 2008 In the present study, the effects of verbal working memory (VWM) and cumulative linguistic knowledge (CLK) on reading comprehension were investigated using an individual difference approach. We examined whether VWM and CLK are distinct verbal factors and w ... Full text Cite

Japanese mothers' use of specialized vocabulary in infant-directed speech: Infant-directed vocabulary in Japanese

Chapter · January 1, 2008 When adults talk to infants or young children, they modify their speech. The specialized speech is sometimes called motherese or infant-directed speech (IDS). Many characteristics of IDS have been documented across many languages, but the best known charac ... Full text Cite

Brain responses in the processing of lexical pitch-accent by Japanese speakers.

Journal Article Neuroreport · December 2007 Near-infrared spectroscopy was used to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of Japanese lexical pitch-accent by adult native speakers of Japanese. We measured cortical hemodynamic responses to a pitch pattern change (high-low vs. low-h ... Full text Cite

A near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) study of lexical pitch accent processing in Japanese speakers

Journal Article Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism · November 13, 2007 Background and aims: The aim of this study is to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of Japanese lexical pitch accent. The left and right cerebral hemispheres work together but differently for auditory language processing in human a ... Cite

Language-relative construal of individuation constrained by universal ontology: revisiting language universals and linguistic relativity.

Journal Article Cognitive science · May 2007 Objects and substances bear fundamentally different ontologies. In this article, we examine the relations between language, the ontological distinction with respect to individuation, and the world. Specifically, in cross-linguistic developmental studies th ... Full text Cite

Processing of infant-directed speech in parents: An fMRI study

Journal Article Neuroscience Research · January 2007 Full text Cite

Young children's use of prosody in sentence parsing.

Journal Article Journal of psycholinguistic research · March 2003 Korean children's ability to use prosodic phrasing in sentence comprehension was studied using two types of ambiguity. First, we examined a word-segmentation ambiguity in which placement of the phrasal boundary leads to different interpretations of a sente ... Full text Cite

Linguistic relativity in Japanese and English: Is language the primary determinant in object classification

Journal Article Journal of East Asian Linguistics · January 1, 2000 In the present study, we tested claims by Lucy (1992a, 1992b) that differences between the number marking systems used by Yucatec Maya and English lead speakers of these languages to differentially attend to either the material composition or the shape of ... Full text Cite

Four to ten month-old infants' sensitivity to the rhythmic pattern of Japanese baby-words

Journal Article 日本音響学会研究発表会講演論文集 · March 1, 1998 Cite

Effects and limitations of prosodic and semantic biases on syntactic disambiguation.

Journal Article Journal of psycholinguistic research · March 1997 This paper examined the effects of prosody on the syntactic ambiguity resolution of Japanese sentences, especially with reference to the interaction with semantic bias. Syntactically ambiguous sentences with different types of semantic bias were constructe ... Full text Cite

Processing down the garden path in Japanese: processing of sentences with lexical homonyms.

Journal Article Journal of psycholinguistic research · March 1997 This paper investigates whether or not Japanese sentences with lexical homonyms cause measurable processing difficulties for Japanese speakers. Pairs of sentences involving lexical homonyms were tested with three types of questionnaires (who-did-what quest ... Full text Cite

Processing down the Japanese garden-path sentences

Journal Article Journal of Psycholinguistic Research · 1997 Cite

Fractal property of eye movements in schizophrenia.

Journal Article Biological cybernetics · August 1996 On the basis of a temporal model of animal behavior we conducted temporal analysis of eye movements in schizophrenic subjects (n = 10) and normal controls (n = 10). We found a fractal property in schizophrenic subjects, the fixation time of eye movement du ... Full text Cite

Prosodic planning while reading aloud: on-line examination of Japanese sentences.

Journal Article Journal of psycholinguistic research · March 1996 In this paper, we discuss the process of generating prosody on-line while reading a sentence orally. We report results from two studies in which eye-voice span was measured while subjects read aloud. In study one, the average eye-voice span for simple text ... Full text Cite

Processing of empty categories in Japanese

Journal Article Journal of Psycholinguistic Research · May 1, 1991 Recent experimental research on the processing of empty categories (EC) in English points to the general conclusion that during on-line processing of a sentence, not only is the presence of an EC detected but its linguistically legitimate antecedents are a ... Full text Cite

Cross-linguistic studies of directionality in first language acquisition: the Japanese data--a response to O'Grady, Suzuki-Wei & Cho 1986.

Journal Article Journal of child language · October 1989 Elsewhere we have argued on the basis of cross linguistic studies of directionality effects on anaphora in child language, that there is no universal 'forward directionality preference (FDP)'; rather such a preference is linked to languages with specific g ... Full text Cite