Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

This study investigates the transfer of topic-comment structures called ‘unagi-sentences,’ from learners’ first language (L1) to their second language (L2) English production. Utilizing the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE), we conducted a cross-proficiency-level study on Japanese learners of English and a cross-varietal study on learners from China, Indonesia, Japan, and Korea. Using Japanese learners as the anchor of this study is motivated by the historical origins of unagi-sentence studies in Japanese syntax, as well as the fact that our research team is based in Japan. The findings suggest that the transfer of unagi-sentences occurs infrequently, regardless of language mode, proficiency level, or L1 background. However, such expressions may be firmly used by some relatively proficient learners or users of English, indicating that this phenomenon could be characteristic of Asian Englishes to a certain extent. The study also discusses the implications of these findings from linguistic, second language acquisition, and World Englishes perspectives.

The lexical boost is an increase in structural priming with overlapping elements like verbs. Residual activation priming theories argue that the boost is an automatic side effect of sentence planning. In contrast, explicit memory theories of the boost argue that it is the result of a non-automatic explicit memory retrieval. These theories were contrasted in Japanese by including a prime memory task in a structural priming study. Structural priming was found for both datives and passives, but no lexical boost was found and one possible reason was that explicit memory for the prime structure was weak. In a follow-up study, priming was found in a sentence completion task, but there was no lexical boost. The existence of abstract priming and the lack of a lexical boost in these studies falsifies theories that argue that verb overlap automatically creates a boost under conditions that exhibit abstract priming.

Investigating the structure of nominalized embedded questions (EQs) in Japanese, this paper proposes that they contain nP and DP on top of CP. Previous studies on clausal nominalization argue that CPs are nominalized by directly merging D. However, the availability of prenominal modification indicates that Japanese nominal EQs involve nP and, in some cases, DP. The functional head n nominalizing an interrogative CP is divided into semantically vacuous and semantically active classes. The semantically vacuous n lacks its own denotation but simply converts an interrogative CP into a nominal category. EQs nominalized the semantically active n do not denote pure questions. Some have a structure similar to the noun complement clause that involves a silent noun semantically equivalent to ‘question’ or ‘issue’. Others express possible answers to questions. EQs nominalized by the semantically active n project up to DP. The blocking effect on extraction and the co-occurrence with a pronoun support the presence of the DP layer. The presence of the DP in Japanese EQs suggests that the NP/DP-dichotomy advocated by Bošković (2005; 2008; 2009) can be relaxed. Japanese is a hybrid language. While it is similar to NP-languages in that it does not have overt articles, its noun phrase still involves the DP layer.

Frieda Fromm-Reichmann’s “On Loneliness” uniquely reflects her core values and experiences. Dr. Fried, an immigrant psychiatrist from Germany, is portrayed in Joanne Greenberg’s semiautobiographical novel not as a replica but as a fictional creation, necessitating complementary biographical accounts of Frieda. From childhood, she honed the skill of managing relationships with her deaf parents and others. Her commitment to the lonely and disabled was professionally inspired by her mentors, Kurt Goldstein and Georg Groddeck. Despite achieving international renown as an outstanding psychotherapist for individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, her later years were marked by ongoing separations from significant others, the advent of the psychotropic treatment era, and worsening deafness. A key to understanding her work may be her Judaism, which she ceased practicing three decades prior.

Through the decades of rejection of the military and militarism since the end of WWII, postwar politics has long discouraged the Japanese public from celebrating traditional classical war-fighting heroism, unlike other militaries of the West. Overt esteem for the JSDF has similarly been discouraged under this environment uniquely antipathetic to any combat. Instead, military heroism in postwar Japan has been characterized by the non-militarised activities of the JSDF, the depoliticized narratives of its military history, and romanticized historical narratives. These traits align with the post-heroic heroism newly emerging in other Western militaries. Still, post-heroic heroism is not new to Japan but has been present since the start of the postwar period. The first section explains public attitudes towards historical war heroes from 1945 through the 2000s. Given the absence of a war-fighting military and a political environment in which combat heroism was taboo, there could be no actual JSDF heroism. Instead, romantic narratives of the tragic loss of war heroes were developed and consumed by the Japanese public. The second section explains a decisive turning point in this trend in the aftermath of the East Japan Great Earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011.

This paper reports a complete secondary analysis of Jeon and Yamashita's (2022) systematic review to build the second language (L2) model of the simple view of reading (SVR). The same meta-analytic methodologies were maintained, with the exception of applying meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM). This study successfully replicated some of the aggregated correlations but not others, owing to (a) the recoding of the original raw data to recreate a dataset and (b) the motivated change in sample selection from a longitudinal study for MASEM. The MASEM results extended previous findings that L2 comprehension skills contribute more to L2 reading comprehension than L2 decoding skills, and together explain a large amount of variance in L2 reading comprehension. The SVR model with metalinguistic skills showed their contribution to L2 decoding and comprehension skills, but no direct impact on L2 reading comprehension, supporting the parsimonious structure of SVR in L2.

Prediction‐based accounts of language acquisition have the potential to explain several different effects in child language acquisition and adult language processing. However, evidence regarding the developmental predictions of such accounts is mixed. Here, we consider several predictions of these accounts in two large‐scale developmental studies of syntactic priming of the English dative alternation. Study 1 was a cross‐sectional study ( N = 140) of children aged 3−9 years, in which we found strong evidence of abstract priming and the lexical boost, but little evidence that either effect was moderated by age. We found weak evidence for a prime surprisal effect; however, exploratory analyses revealed a protracted developmental trajectory for verb‐structure biases, providing an explanation as for why prime surprisal effects are more elusive in developmental populations. In a longitudinal study ( N = 102) of children in tightly controlled age bands at 42, 48, and 54 months, we found priming effects emerged on trials with verb overlap early but did not observe clear evidence of priming on trials without verb overlap until 54 months. There was no evidence of a prime surprisal effect at any time point and none of the effects were moderated by age. The results relating to the emergence of the abstract priming and lexical boost effects are consistent with prediction‐based models, while the absence of age‐related effects appears to reflect the structure‐specific challenges the dative presents to English‐acquiring children. Overall, our complex pattern of findings demonstrates the value of developmental data sets in testing psycholinguistic theory.

This chapter focuses on the Tō-tsūji (唐通事), the official Japanese–Chinese interpreters in Early Modern Nagasaki. The Tō-tsūji’s task was not limited to language mediation; it included diplomatic negotiations in the course of interpreting duties. In particular, this chapter focuses on the case of Tei Einei (鄭永寧, 1829–1897) who worked as a Tō-tsūji at the end of the Edo period (1603–1868). Tei engaged in multiple tasks in accordance with the social contexts surrounding Tō-tsūji and was particularly influenced by two contextual turning points. The first turning point was the fact that the Sino–Japanese trade in Nagasaki, in which the Tō-tsūji were mainly involved, began to falter around 1850. The second is that the Edo shogunate ended in 1868, which brought the official system of the Tō-tsūji to its conclusion. Tei survived both turning points, and after the Edo era, began to work in the fields of diplomacy and education, drawing on his experience as a Tō-tsūji. This chapter describes Tei’s achievements and the roles he performed throughout his career. It also considers the social context and the two turning points that influenced his roles.

In this chapter, I discuss Otokichi’s (音吉/乙吉, c. 1818–1867) marginality and vulnerability as a castaway-turned-tsūji in the middle of the nineteenth century. He survived a maritime accident in his youth and later served as an interpreter in a diplomatic setting, where the Anglo–Japanese Friendship Treaty—the first of its kind between the two countries—was signed in 1854. Subsequently, Japan opened two ports to British vessels. However, with regard to the negotiations that resulted in the treaty, the British government did not actually demand that Japanese ports be opened to British vessels; the intention, against the backdrop of the Crimean War, was to seek information on the Russian fleet. The miscommunications that occurred as the treaty was being negotiated—in which negotiations Otokichi was involved as an interpreter mediating between the two sides—were assumed to have taken place due to complicated communication channels. Although Otokichi is remembered as a protagonist in some biographies, he has been almost completely ignored in translation and interpreting research. This case study primarily reveals a little-known aspect of the history of early modern Japanese tsūji by shedding light on Otokichi in the context of his role as an interpreter.

Tense/aspect morphology on verbs is often thought to depend on event features like telicity, but it is not known how speakers identify these features in visual scenes. To examine this question, we asked Japanese speakers to describe computer-generated animations of simple actions with variation in visual features related to telicity. Experiments with adults and children found that they could use goal information in the animations to select appropriate past and progressive verb forms. They also produced a large number of different verb forms. To explain these findings, a deep-learning model of verb production from visual input was created that could produce a human-like distribution of verb forms. It was able to use visual cues to select appropriate tense/aspect morphology. The model predicted that video duration would be related to verb complexity, and past tense production would increase when it received the endpoint as input. These predictions were confirmed in a third study with Japanese adults. This work suggests that verb production could be tightly linked to visual heuristics that support the understanding of events.

We examine the rotating gaseous configurations in the point-mass and logarithmic potentials, using the similarity method, and analytically find new-type solutions for astrophysical tori. We ignore the self-gravity, viscosity, magnetic, and radiation fields, but consider the isothermal and polytropic cases. In the point-mass potential, the gaseous configuration is generally limited within the conical region for both the isothermal and polytropic cases. In the logarithmic potential, on the other hand, the gaseous configuration extends over the whole space for the isothermal case, whereas it is limited within the conical region in the polytropic case. For both potentials, the density contours have toroidal or conical shapes with a self-similar manner. When the rotational speed is high and/or the sound speed is low (cold), the configurations become flat, and vice versa.

We examine radiation-supported rotating tori in the Newtonian and logarithmic potentials, using the similarity method, and analytically find new-type self-similar solutions of astrophysical tori for both cases. In the Newtonian case around a central point mass, radiative quantities such as fluxes and energy density are expressed in a simple form, although the expression for the gas density is somewhat complicated. It is noted that the gaseous configuration in the Newtonian (point-mass) case has a conical surface, where the radiation energy density vanishes. In the logarithmic case in, e.g., dark matter, on the other hand, simple analytical solutions for matter and radiation distributions are obtained. In the logarithmic case, furthermore, the gaseous configuration extends over the whole space, if it exists. In both cases, the density contours have toroidal shapes, and elongate in the equatorial direction due to rotation.

The purpose of this study is to investigate regional differences in the business characteristics of Japanese agricultural cooperatives (JAs), which have been widely criticized for depending on non-agricultural activities, contradictory to cooperative principles. We construct a panel data set over 2004–2019 from the financial statements of JAs’ prefectural-level federations and use a stochastic meta-frontier cost function model, which enables the decomposition of meta-frontier efficiency into two components: technical efficiency and technology gap ratios. The operational differences between JAs in urban and rural areas are investigated by comparing their efficiency and economies of scale and scope. The main results are summarized as follows: first, the meta-cost efficiency scores of JAs in urban areas are, on average, larger than those in rural areas, which reflects the differences in technology gap ratios. Second, JAs exhibit overall economies of scale in both areas; however, the product-specific economies of scale differ between financial and nonfinancial outputs. Finally, JAs in rural areas exhibit relatively larger economies of scope than those in urban areas. These findings indicate clear distinctions between urban and rural areas in cost-reduction effects. Finally, financial activities bring higher efficiency for JAs in urban areas, while benefits from simultaneous production are larger for those in rural areas.

Assessing learners’ individual differences helps identify students who need teacher support in classrooms. Previous studies have examined second language (L2) achievement based on reading anxiety because reading is an input-based activity essential for successful L2 learning. This study applied a latent rank model to identify L2 learners who are likely to be struggling or successful in classrooms according to their L2 reading anxiety symptoms. Moreover, a psychometric function was developed to determine the cutoff anxiety scores that discriminate against their substantial differences. The model was applied to responses from the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS) provided by 335 Japanese learners of English. The results showed that the FLRAS classified students into three ranked groups with ordinal information regarding L2 reading anxiety. Rank 1 exhibited good conditions in L2 reading anxiety. Rank 2 reported high anxiety toward unfamiliar grammar during L2 reading. Rank 3 had even higher anxiety levels, especially for vocabulary and grammatical knowledge deficits and reading difficulty. The cutoff anxiety scores estimated by the model detected students who failed their L2 class with 79% accuracy. Theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical issues in language anxiety were discussed in terms of diagnosis and different approaches to teaching L2 reading.

This article focuses on the concept of space and two different structures of space in the mythological chronicles Kojiki and Nihon Shoki . It considers two main invisible divine gods of space, probably connected to Chinese mythology and appearing in the mythological chronicles first – Ame-no-minaka-nushi and Kuni-no-tokotachi . It traces their evolution in history and also deals with obtaining by some of Japanese gods, within the Buddhist worldview, a fantastic appearance and the key role in cosmogenesis. It also deals with the connection of the first verbal descriptions of the appearance of the Japanese lands as a living creature or a symbolic thing seen from above with the ritual of “viewing the realm” ( kunimi ), and also with a technique of Chinese-Japanese painting wherein an object is portrayed as seen from above (for the purpose of which, in the cases of indoor scenes, a building is depicted without a roof), etc.