This study examines the properties of gestures that serve to convey an image of the
speaker. The gesture observed can be perceived as a sub-type of gestures that linguistic
anthropologist Charles Goodwin termed “environmentally coupled gestures” in that the
meaning of the gesture is determined not by its semiotic property but by the mutual
elaboration of the gesture and other semiotic resources such as artifacts, utterance, and
gaze. A conversation analysis was conducted based on data collected during interaction
among members of a project team constructing an installation for a science museum.
The results show that team members recurrently re-do gestures that convey the image
of the speaker along with another gesture constructed to be coupled with the original
gesture.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate the writing style and revision process of
a contemporary fiction writer from a cognitive science perspective. We focus on the
work of Mishima Prize winning author, Otaro Maijo. Using Type Trace, a text editor
devised by Dividual Inc., as an analysis tool for observing the writing process, we con-
sider features that have not been detected by creative experiment, protocol analysis or
manuscript research. Based on observations of Maijo’s writing process, firstly revisions
are categorized as additions, deletions, substitutions, distributions, or consolidations.
Secondly, revisions are further classified as “revisions at a generative point”, “revisions
in a generative sentence”, “revisions in a generative paragraph”, or “revisions beyond
the generative paragraph”, according to the remoteness of the revision from the point
of composition. The results reveal that revisions such as the substitution of words and
adjustments in sentence length were mostly performed together with text generation.
All revisions that were made after an interlude took the form of revisions far removed
from sentence generation. We find that Maijo’s writing style tends to be maintained
for several weeks to months and then changes substantially.

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Research on sentence production often assumes that there is a universal mechanism
for the sentence production. Nevertheless, languages investigated so far are typolog-
ically quite limited. The aim of this paper is to investigate how VOS sentences are
produced in Kaqchikel, a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala, examining animacy
effects on the choice of word order. We conducted two picture description tasks manip-
ulating animacy of the patient entity in the event while the agent was always human
being. Throughout those experiments, less VOS sentences were produced with an an-
imate patient than with an inanimate patient, suggesting that the similarity between
agent and patient, rather than the accessibility of the patient per se, affects the choice
of word order in Kaqchikel. Based on these results, we argue that VOS sentences are
produced in a way that an agent is processed first and retained in the memory until
the end of the sentence.

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We aim to create gradual readability (or target age) measures from infants to elder
children. For Japanese texts, several readability measures have been proposed, none
of which is applied to texts for infants. Therefore, in this paper, we employ 123 pic-
ture books which are clearly decided fine-grained target ages as criterial corpus. Then
we investigate the applicability of two previous works to these picture books. Both
works show modelate performance. Then we propose a method using new learner and
features, and we achieved higher performance to guess the target age.

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The research aimed to evaluate how reliably major Parts-of-Speech (PoS) (i.e., Noun,
Verb, Adjective, Adverb) can be predicted from surface word forms —more concretely,
ending character n-grams (n= 2, 3, 4) of surface word forms— of English and Czech,
to compare the results from the two languages. It was conducted with two objectives.
First, it wanted to establish the hypothesis that the degrees to which PoS is reliably
predicated from surface word forms can vary drastically among languages, though effec-
tive measurement of the predictability is unimplemented yet. (If a language has a high
degree of predictability of PoS from surface word forms, we can say is has a high form-
function transparency in PoS recognition.) Second, it wanted to show that English is
a language whose vocabulary is relatively hard to acquire, as far as a good predictabil-
ity of POS from word forms facilitates vocabulary acquisition, which is admittedly an
unconfirmed hypothesis, with other things being equal.
Results of Formal Concept Analysis (Ganter and Wille 1999) applied to the English
and Czech data suggest that ending character n-gram of English words had noticeably
less predictability than ones of Czech words in terms of major PoS, i.e., N, V, Adj and
Adv, because they are highly confusing in English. This means that vocabulary acqui-
sition can be significantly harder in English than in Czech, if other things being equal.
The results also suggest that English was one of those languages in which effective PoS
recognition requires multi-word processing strategy.

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The aim of this study was to review the roles of visual cues in communication between
performers and audience members during a music performance. Although numerous
studies have elucidated that visual cues convey such elements as performance manners,
emotional expressions, musical structure, or sound expressions, little has been done to
provide a holistic perspective of these findings. Thus, we scrutinized how visual cues af-
fect the encoding of performers’ intentions or the decoding of a performance by audience
members. With respect to each cue, the existing literature has revealed that body move-
ment directs the manner of performance, emotional expression, and musical structures
toward the audience members. Specific parts of the body, particularly, demonstrate
this tendency. Facial expressions serve to convey emotional expressions and features
of sound. Gaze is regarded as an important cue for communication, although its role
remains unclear. Physical attractiveness and attire also influence performance evalua-
tions. Overall, visual cues dominate over auditory cues and have a powerful impact on
performer-audience interaction in many studies. These results contribute to a deeper
understanding of music performance and music appreciation in concert or under mul-
timodal conditions.

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A motion picture is comprised of multiple shots, and filmmakers have developed
techniques for projecting smooth and continuous transitions of shots. One of these
techniques is known as a matching-action cut in which a cut occurs in the middle of
an event and successive shots are spliced. The present study consists of an experi-
mental survey that assesses editing methods for making a seamless match-action cut.
Participants viewed short movie clips of various events, with varying camera angles,
with different timing of cuts, and with time-sequence manipulation of shot transition
(straight-match, ellipsis, overlapping). Movie clips were presented in pairs and partici-
pants determined which of each pair set of clips appeared continuous. Based on those
decisions, psychological scaling was conducted taking effect of time-sequence manipula-
tion into consideration. However, from the analysis, a general preference for a specific
manipulation was not confirmed.

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Speech perception in prelexical processing is reviewed mainly due to the research of
the author of this paper to show a view of speech perception.
Phonemic features are distributed in time course by co-articulation in speech pro-
duction. The distributed features are perceptually integrated to perceive the phoneme
according to the intensity of the feature. The basic perceptual unit of speech is larger
than phoneme unit. It is determined due to the timing (rhythmic) system of the lis-
tener’s native language e.g. syllable (French), mora (Japanese), unit determined due
to stress (English). These results indicate that the perceptual integration of phonemic
feature is organized to perceive a basic perceptual unit.
Then cross-linguistic experiments among French, Dutch and Japanese show that a
listener of each language perceive the unit not to violate the phonotactic constraints
of his/her native language. The results show that it is important to take into account
language rhythmic system to learn the language as the second one.
Finally, it is proposed that the study of speech perception could contribute to that
of language acquisition and second language learning and vice versa.

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