This study examines gendered characteristics in four female Japanese language learners’ discourse practices in a communicative setting, where they interact with native Japanese speaking friends in a JFL context. Focusing on the relationship between gender ideologies and discourse practices, I explore the extent to which learners are aware of gender ideologies in the Japanese community and how t...

One of the major problems when translating from Japanese into a European language such as German or English is to determine definiteness of noun phrases in order to choose the correct determiner in the target language. Even though in Japanese, noun phrase reference is said to depend in large parts on the discourse context, we show that in many cases there also exist linguistic markers for defin...

An increasing number of international students, whose teaching and learning practices are very different from that of the UK, is studying in the U.K. This study poses the question of whether Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is the most optimum language teaching approach in today’s multicultural society regardless of cultural differences. The Japanese teaching method (Japanisation) was pres...

i had an opportunity to translate the two most famous letters of imam ‘alī (a.s.) in nahj al-balāghah (peak of eloquence), the famous collection of the preaching and letters of imam ‘alī and one of the most sacred books of shia islam after the qur‘an, from arabic into japanese. one of them is his letter to imam ḥasan, his eldest son and the second imam, and the other is an appointment letter to...

This paper introduces three recent topics in speech recognition research at NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone) Human Interface Laboratories. The first topic is a new HMM (hidden Markov model) technique that uses VQ-code bigrams to constrain the output probability distribution of the model according to the VQ-codes of previons frames. The output probability distribution changes depending on th...

To examine the relation between the cortical substrates that support the comprehension of one's native language and those that support a second language, fMRI measures of cortical activation were taken as native Japanese participants, who had acquired moderate fluency in English, listened to auditory sentences in Japanese and English. In addition, to examine the impact of processing difficulty ...

Research on international joint ventures (IJV) finds difficulties in managing cross-cultural teams. Our research aims to understand how cultural differences between Japanese and American firms in IJV projects effect team performance through computational experimentation. We characterize culture and cultural differences using two dimensions: practices and values. Practices refer to each culture’...

Is agency a straightforward and universal feature of human experience? Or is the construction of agency (including attention to and memory for people involved in events) guided by patterns in culture? In this paper we focus on one aspect of cultural experience: patterns in language. We examined English and Japanese speakers' descriptions of intentional and accidental events. English and Japanes...

PURPOSE To describe (a) the assessment of residual speech sound disorders (SSDs) in bilinguals by distinguishing speech patterns associated with second language acquisition from patterns associated with misarticulations and (b) how assessment of domains such as speech motor control and phonological awareness can provide a more complete understanding of SSDs in bilinguals. METHOD A review of J...

three iranian native strains and three japanese commercial lines of the silkworm bombyx mori were analyzed using amplified fragment length polymorphism (aflp) markers. a set of ten psti/taqi primer combinations amplified a total of 322 bands out of which 251 (%78) were polymorphic. estimates of nei’s gene diversity for all loci in individual strains and commercial lines indicated a higher degre...