Masaki HISANO (久野 雅樹)

Offer Organization: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, System Name: Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research, Fund Type: -, Overall Grant Amount: - (direct: 2900000, indirect: 870000)
To identify active brain regions representing subjective impression expressed by Japanese onomatopoeias based on sound symbolism, we performed fMRI measurements in response to auditory and visual presentations of onomatopoeias. Although we obtained typical patterns of brain activities when onomatopoeias were presented, we did not detect statistically significant differences in fMRI signals between onomatopoeias and standard adjectives and/or adverbs. This result suggests that each onomatopoeia has acquired its own niche in the semantic space spanned by Japanese vocabularies at the same level of adjectives and adverbs, and hence does not have a special characteristic other than the fact that it has emerged from sound symbolism.

Offer Organization: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, System Name: Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B), Fund Type: -, Overall Grant Amount: - (direct: 12800000, indirect: 2610000)
Before a compulsory education system for foreign children is started, we must prepare for such a situation by changing our educational environment to administer the system properly. Based on our related research, we concluded the following, a part of which has already been administered by local governments.
(1) An educational system in which foreign children can learn Japanese language before entering school is indispensable.
(2) Before foreign children and their parents come to Japan, parents should at least understand the Japanese school system to ease preparations to receive children from overseas. Our research group revised the explanatory booklet that was originally published by Ota Asahi Elementary School, Gunma, Japan, and informed the public about it.
(3) In light of the accumulated Japanese language teaching experiences at an elementary school in Sakai, Isesaki, Gunma, our research group published a basic Japanese textbook for children : Yattemiyou! Nihongo Kantan.
(4) When special-needs schools or classes accept foreign children, the schools and classes must be prepared to communicate in the children's native language.
(5) Irrespective of the children's and their parents' expectations of whether they are going to return to their country or stay in Japan permanently, it would be effective for them to be informed during the elementary school years how valuable it is for the children to attend high school.
(6) It is necessary for foreign children's parents who have just come to Japan to receive a clear explanation of differences between Japanese school culture and South American culture, such as the costs of school lunch meals and course materials, and ways to regard their children's athletic events. Furthermore, it is desired that parents receive explanations from principals that a school is not a day-care center for children. In situations when only one foreign child's parent, especially the mother, is foreign and is unable to communicate in Japanese, some problems about the child's language and academic ability might occur. To prevent such cases, we must construct a support system.
(7) Pursuing an ideal program of teacher training for those who are in charge of foreign students, a member of our research group at the Professional School for Teacher Education of Gunma University recorded the graduate courses in multicultural symbiosis and published it in report form. We also attempted a comparison of the contents of such education at the Gunma University with that at the Aichi University of Education.

Offer Organization: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, System Name: Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), Fund Type: -, Overall Grant Amount: - (direct: 4000000, indirect: -)
Japanese language learners always have difficulties to learn Kanji in foreign countries. We have tried making a resource of Kanji learning, and developing a system to provide it all over the world by WWW. There are a number of barriers to the dissemination of information in Japanese, including the difficulty of learning to read the complex writing system of Japanese, as well as the technological difficulty of processing and displaying the thousands of characters used to write Japanese.
The system we have developed in this project displays Japanese text using 90,000 GIF image files, thus allowing one to view arbitrary data in the Japanese language using any Internet browser with a graphical interface, thus avoiding the need to install any specialized Japanese software. A part of this system has been applied and accepted in a national project by the Ministry of economy, Trade and Industry. These results show that our study has not only academic value but also political views.

Offer Organization: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, System Name: Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), Fund Type: -, Overall Grant Amount: - (direct: 1300000, indirect: -)
This research demonstrates syntactic effects in resolving lexical ambiguity in Japanese, an S-O-V language. In particular, the effect of a postpositional particle on the semantic access of sentence-final ambiguous verbs in two kinds of sentences, (a) S-ga-V sentences (subject, subjective postpositional particle, and ambiguous verb) and (b) O-wo-V sentences (object, objective postpositional particle, and ambiguous verb), will be demonstrated. In this research, The postpositional particles are designed to disambiguate the verbs' meanings as (a) S-ga-Vi. (intransitive verb) or (b) O-wo-Vt. (transitive verb).
A cross-modal priming method was used in which a target noun was visually presented by Kanji characters one-syllable before the end, or immediately after the end, of a sentence-final verb presented auditorily. One target noun was related to both the prime verb's meaning and the postpositional particle used (context-dependent), while another target noun was related to only the prime verb's meaning, but it was unrelated to the postpositional particle used (context-independent), and a third target was unrelated to both of the verb's and the particle's meaning. For this analysis, we hand coded the data of naming latencies based on digital spectrograms of subjects' voices, because the voice key measure has been considered unsuitable to measure naming latency accurately.
This research has been pursued with reference to the constraint-based lexicalist approach. The parallel distributed processing (PDP) models (connectionist models) of disambiguation are well suited to implement this constraint-based lexicalist view that human natural language understanding involves constraint-satisfaction mechanisms. We performed a computer simulation of this experiment using our PDP model. Consistent with experimental data, the PDP model can successfully simulate the effect of context-dependent and context-independent frequencies of ambiguous verbs in the time-course of activation.