Plenary Speaker

Talk Schedule

April 18th (Fri), 16:40-17:40

Profile

Reiko Mazuka is the Team Leader for the Laboratory for Language Development, RIKEN Center for Brain Science, Japan & a Research Professor at the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, Duke University. She received PhD in Developmental Psychology from Cornell University, MSc in General Linguistics from University of Edinburgh, and MA in Psychology from Nagoya University Japan. She studies infants' phonological development and early language acquisition primarily with Japanese infants and children. The purpose of her research is to shed light on our understanding of human brain development by investigating the process of acquisition of language skills, specifically in relation to phonological development.Since the sound system of a language is one of the first things infants learn, an examination of the initial stages of phonological acquisition can provide critical insight into how the human brain is structured to learn a language.
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Title

Evidence from East Asian languages can enhance psycholinguistic research

Abstract

To date, research in psycholinguistics has been conducted primarily on English and other western European languages, even though they comprise only a fraction of the world’s languages (Kidd & Garcia 2022). Yet, findings from these limited languages have been widely assumed to apply to human languages in general. More recently, however, the limitations of theories and models based on a limited set of languages have become widely recognized, and there are new efforts to broaden the range of target languages (Singh, Rajendra & Mazuka, 2024).

In this presentation, I will discuss findings from three studies, each of which demonstrate that research on East Asian languages can offer significant contributions to experimental psycholinguistics by taking advantage of a broader diversity of evidence.

Our first study examined young infants’ abilities to discriminate phonemic segments in their native language, comparing Japanese-, Korean- and Thai-learning infants, specifically exploiting the fact that those languages represent three distinct types of stop consonants. Our results revealed that despite the dominant view in the field -- that young infants start out with an ability to discriminate almost any phonemic contrasts in world languages -- none of our results followed the expected pattern.

Our second study examined pitch exaggeration when mothers speak to their infants (called Infant-directed speech, IDS). Previous studies on European languages showed that one of the strongest characteristics of IDS is an exaggerated, sing-song-like prosody, and concluded that Japanese mothers are an exception to that pattern. We found that Japanese mothers did in fact expand the pitch range of their IDS, but by examining cross-linguistic differences in the way prosody is organized in Japanese, we showed that their pitch-range expansions are deployed differently.

Our third study examined the prosody of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Children with ASD have long been characterized as speaking with unnatural prosody. As Japanese intonation allows us to distinguish linguistically determined parts of intonation (i.e., phrase accent and lexical pitch accent) from pragmatically determined intonation, we compared the speech of ASD children with that of typically developing children (TD). Our results showed that ASD children’s use of linguistically determined prosody was intact, while their use of pragmatically determined prosody was more likely disrupted. This distinction was measurable only by taking advantage of the language specific characteristics of Japanese prosody.



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