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Paper short abstract

Cognitive semantics approach is utilized to formulate a typology of spatial description strategies based on the results of a spontaneous speech experiment involving 51 Japanese native speaking residents of the Kanto area.

Paper long abstract

This paper aims to describe and analyze semantic features of spatial description based on the results of a spontaneous speech experiment involving Japanese native speaking residents of the Kanto area. The main objective of this study is to formulate an experimental material based typology of spatial description strategies utilized by Japanese native speakers.

Four major strategies for spatial description were described by Kobozeva, I.M.(2000, Grammar of Spatial Description) based on the survey conducted with Russian native speakers: Frame Strategy (FS), Strategy of Outstanding Objects (SOO), Path Strategy (PS), and Scanning Strategy (SS).

The experimental material for this study is based on a spontaneous speech experiment on spatial description strategies with 51 Japanese native speaking participants conducted in Tokyo in 2016. The survey consisted of 6 visual stimuli: 2 landscape pictures, 2 interior pictures, and 2 still life pictures. Participants were asked to describe the stimuli in a manner so that a person who has not seen the pictures may understand the location of the objects in the pictures.

A corpus of 300 texts was created based on the recordings of the descriptions taken during the survey, and analyzed with cognitive semantics approach to spatial description (Talmy, L., 2003, Toward a Cognitive Semantics).

The preliminary findings suggest that the typology of strategies proposed by Kobozeva could be applied to the analysis of spatial descriptions produced by native Japanese speaking participants. Three of the strategies: FS, SS, and SOO were used by the participants, with FS and SS prevailing. However, PS, which is defined as a strategy determined by the trajectory of an imaginary movement of a narrator through the picture, is not present in the data. Moreover, strong opposition of temae (front)/oku (back) found in the data suggests a presence of Perspective Strategy among spatial description strategies.

The results of the experiment support the findings of the previous studies (e.g., Kobozeva, 2000) that the same participant tends to utilize the same description strategy during all the trials, and that the strategy of verbalization of visual information might be considered one of the features of individual's cognitive makeup.

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Paper short abstract

A mysterious discrepancy in the prevalence of English and Japanese dyslexic populations is led to strengthening the mora-basic hypothesis that the moraic rhythm serves as a universal prosodic frame. This conforms to a human neurobiological restriction inclined toward a synchronized behavior.

Paper long abstract

The neurobiological disorder called dyslexia (< Greek dys- 'impaired' + lexis 'word') is a specific learning disability that affects only literacy skills. It has been generally agreed that congenital form of dyslexia (termed developmental dyslexia) stems from a particular problem in language acquisition affecting phonological awareness. However, the exact nature of phonological awareness has not been made all clear.

This paper spotlights the mysterious discrepancy in the prevalence of dyslexic populations between the English-speaking world and the Japanese-speaking world; namely the figure as high as 15% or even more for the former and the figure as low as 2% or even less for the latter. On the basis of English dyslexic reading marked by an overproduction of CV-units in the absence of VC-units, the discrepancy is shown to be due to differences in prosodic structures between the two languages. For rhyme(VC)-oriented languages such as English, the readers must have rhyme-awareness which allows them to depict the unit rhyme through prosodic restructuring from CV-C to C-VC. A failure to have rhyme-awareness manifests as phonological dyslexia. For mora(CV)-oriented, rhyme-less languages such as Japanese, rhyme-awareness (and thus the prosodic restructuring) is irrelevant. Consequently, phonological dyslexia is largely undetected. In other words, phonological dyslexia is hidden in mora-based languages, but predicted to surface in ESL/EFL classroom. Low proficiency of the ESL/EFL students might be due to their having developmental dyslexia, which calls for special consideration to meet the students' specific needs.

The paper furthermore explores neurological explanation of the failure in prosodic restructuring. It is shown that phonological dyslexia is a cognitive disorder of neurobiological origin which cannot bear a cognitive load imposed on the suggested prosodic restructuring in the affected child's brain. The paper reaches to strengthen the mora-basic hypothesis that mora, which is formed by coarticulation of consonants and vowels, serves the elementary prosodic frame of all languages of the world. It is suggested that the mora-basic hypothesis conforms to a human neurological restriction inclined toward a synchronized behavior that had been acquired in the process of human evolution.