Hiroko Hagiwara

Tokyo Metropolitan Institute | TMU · Language Sciences

Vocal control plays a critical role in smooth social communication. Speakers constantly monitor auditory feedback (AF) and make adjustments when their voices deviate from their intentions. Previous studies have shown that when certain acoustic features of the AF are artificially altered, speakers compensate for this alteration in the opposite direc...

Learning a second language (L2) proceeds with individual approaches to proficiency in the language. Individual differences including sex, as well as working memory (WM) function appear to have strong effects on behavioral performance and cortical responses in L2 processing. Thus, by considering sex and WM capacity, we examined neural responses duri...

The genetic basis controlling language development remains elusive. Previous studies of the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) Val(158)Met genotype and cognition have focused on prefrontally guided executive functions involving dopamine. However, COMT may further influence posterior cortical regions implicated in language perception. We investigat...

Previous neuroimaging studies in adults have revealed that first and second languages (L1/L2) share similar neural substrates, and that proficiency is a major determinant of the neural organization of L2 in the lexical-semantic and syntactic domains. However, little is known about neural substrates of children in the phonological domain, or about s...

Self-recognition, being indispensable for successful social communication, has become a major focus in current social neuroscience. The physical aspects of the self are most typically manifested in the face and voice. Compared with the wealth of studies on self-face recognition, self-voice recognition (SVR) has not gained much attention. Converging...

We investigated the spatiotemporal patterns of event-related potentials to examine how semantic categories affect early stages of written word processing in the brain. We used a semantic priming paradigm in which the categories of prime and target words were the same (animate or inanimate). Event-related potentials were recorded while native Japane...

We investigated brain activity in 3-5-year-old preschoolers as they listened to connected speech stimuli in Japanese (first language), English (second language), and Chinese (a rarely exposed, foreign language) using near-infrared spectroscopy. Unlike the younger preschoolers who had been exposed to English for almost 1 year, brain activity in the...

Adults seem to have greater difficulties than children in acquiring a second language (L2) because of the alleged "window of opportunity" around puberty. Postpuberty Japanese participants learned a new English rule with simplex sentences during one month of instruction, and then they were tested on "uninstructed complex sentences" as well as "instr...

The relationship between 2 words is judged by the meanings of words. Here, we examined how the semantic relatedness of words is structured in each individual brain. During measurements of event-related potentials (ERPs), participants performed semantic-relatedness judgments of word pairs. For each participant, we divided word pairs into 2 groups--r...

We investigated the effects of non-native language (English) exposure on event-related potentials (ERPs) in first- and second-year (four- and five-year-old) preschool Japanese native speakers while they listened to semantically congruent and incongruent Japanese sentences. The children were divided into a non-native language exposed group (exposed...

Children's foreign-language (FL) learning is a matter of much social as well as scientific debate. Previous behavioral research indicates that starting language learning late in life can lead to problems in phonological processing. Inadequate phonological capacity may impede lexical learning and semantic processing (phonological bottleneck hypothes...

Lexical prosody plays an important role in speech comprehension. However, the electrophysiological nature and time course of processing lexical prosody in mora-timed languages are rarely known in contrast to the wealth of knowledge in stress-timed languages and syllable-timed languages like German and French. In the present study, lexical pitch-acc...

A large-scale study of 484 elementary school children (6-10 years) performing word repetition tasks in their native language (L1-Japanese) and a second language (L2-English) was conducted using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Three factors presumably associated with cortical activation, language (L1/L2), word frequency (high/low), and hemisp...

A foreign language (a language not spoken in one's community) is difficult to master completely. Early introduction of foreign-language (FL) education during childhood is becoming a standard in many countries. However, the neural process of child FL learning still remains largely unknown. We longitudinally followed 322 school-age children with dive...

We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the effects of non-native language (English) exposure in first-, second-, and third-year (4- to 6-year-old) preschool Japanese native children while they listened to semantically congruent and incongruent Japanese sentences. Our previous study (Takahashi et al., in press) showed that difference...

Neural mechanisms that underlie the processing of lexical pitch-accent in auditory Japanese were investigated by using event-related potentials. Native speakers of Japanese listened to two types of short sentences, both consisting of a noun and a verb. The sentences ended with a verb with either congruous or incongruous pitch-accent pattern, where...

One of the most fundamental and universal properties of human language is a phenomenon called displacement. In the present study, we used multichannel event-related potentials (ERPs) to identify the nature of this phenomenon with Japanese, a subject-object-verb (SOV) language of relatively free word order. The ERPs of sentences of canonical word or...

Brain activities were compared between semantic and syntactic processing in the Japanese language using event-related potentials with a 58-ch EEG system. We previously found that semantic violations elicited N400 and syntactic violations elicited P600 but not early left anterior negativity (ELAN) or left anterior negativity (LAN) using a relatively...

Language processing was investigated using event-related potentials obtained using a multichannel (58-channel) EEG system, with regard to semantic dependency (i.e., selectional restriction between a verb and the arguments it takes: the SR type) and syntactic dependency between sentence-final particles and interrogative phrases (the WH-Q type) in Ja...

Language processing was investigated using event-related potentials obtained using a multichannel (58-channel) EEG system, with regard to semantic dependency (i.e., selectional restriction between a verb and the arguments it takes; the SR type) and syntactic dependency between sentence-final particles and interrogative phrases (the WH-Q type) in Ja...

There has been much controversy concerning the mental mechanisms involved in the processing of complex words, especially between the dual mechanism theory and the single mechanism theory over inflectional morphology. In this article we present a new set of data from Japanese causatives drawn from the experiments on aphasic patients, which show that...

This article presents a new set of experimental data from brain-damaged aphasic patients as well as from normals on the processing of two nominal suffixes in Japanese, i.e. -sa and -mi. Their difference with respect to productivity, as confirmed by the experiment on normal adults, provides evidence for the existence of a productive rule-like proces...

In this paper I argue that in a hierarchical structure of a sentence, the lower the position of the functional head and its projection, the more accessible they are to an agrammatic aphasic. The major empirical basis for this includes spontaneous speech data and an acceptability judgment experiment by Japanese agrammatic patients as well as the ava...

Syntactic comprehension of various types of passive sentences by Japanese Broca′s aphasic patients was investigated. Based on their performance on the so-called "possessive passive" and "indirect passive," we exemplified that the comprehension abilities of Broca′s aphasics and agrammatic Broca′s aphasics point to a distinction between the gapped an...

Syntactic comprehension disturbances in Japanese aphasics were investigated focusing on the role of category order and thematic role order. The data from Japanese aphasics show that the canonicity of thematic role order determines the ease of interpretation of different sentence types. This finding implies that language-specific factors, rather tha...

Written for the Dept. of Linguistics. Typescript. Thesis (M.A.) - McGill University. Bibliography: leaves 287-306.