An observational study has reported that most mothers keep their babies “bathe in sound” most of their waking hours. But, what exactly is the function of mother's talk with her baby? This was the question which we tried to answer.
Analysis was performed on the speech samples of forty children (10 min for each child), collected in the picturebook situation (PS) and the building-block situation (BS).
Main results are as follows:
1. The total number of utterances was not significantly different between mother and her child, but, as for the frequency of the initiation of “dialogues”, the initiator was predominantly the mother.
2. By the classification of mother's speech into three functional categories -“reply”, “report”, and “request” -it was found that “reply” was the most frequent, “report” the least, and “request” midway. As was expected, “request” evoked most frequently child's speech responses, and “report” least.
3. More than half of the speech of “reply” were not passive and simple but active and complex, consisting of “corrected imitations” and other more elaborated forms of speech. It may also worth mentioning that almost all of the instances of mother's imitation of her child's speech were corrected (or “educational”) imitations.
4. Frequencies, as well as forms and functions, of mother's speech were found to be dependent on the chracteristics of situations.

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Purpose. “On” is a very difficult concept to translate into foreign languages. Japanese English dictionaries assign kindness, favor, love, obligation, or indebtedness to this word, but they are not broad enough to cover all the forms of “on”. Before the termination of Pacific war, loyalty towards emperor and filial piety supported the every structure of Japanese community, and authoritarian attitude among the Japanese. But since the new Constitution become effective, these concepts have changed drastically, and the contents of “on” also is expected to change, because it has very close connection with them. With these considerations, two surveys were planned.
(I) Method. Free associations and semantic differential ratings concerning “on”, were obtained from 215 adults (male and female, their ages ranging 17-50) in Tokyo. Results. Clearly “on” has two aspects, the one is based on old-fashioned, feudalistic, one-way devotion, etc., and the other is based on universality of human nature. Older people recognize the former aspect, but regard it as more “beautiful” because of the latter aspect, and highly esteem it as a moral standard, In contrast with this, younger people show fairly negative attitude towards the former aspect.
(II) Method. Costant sum method. 100 points were assigned to 22 attributes of “on” for 19 human relations listed below. Enquetes were presented to three groups of Ss, (i) younger male, (ii) younger female, and (iii) older people. Number of Ss in each group was about 50, all living in Tokyo. Attributes were (1) true love, (2) gratitude, (3) tradition, (4) “taimen” or appearances, (5) human obligation, (6) “girl”, (7) fictitious love, (8) voluntariness, (9) social coercion, (10) friendship, (11) comradeship, (12) expectation of future guarantee, (13) benefit of others, (14) dependence on authority, (15) conscience, (16) indebtedness, (17) reverence, (18) pursuit of own benefit, (19) mutual dependence, (20) social courtesy, (21) contract, and (22) feudally. Human relations used were (1) parent-child, (2) main family-branch family, (3) parent and child in law, (4) ancestordescendant, (5) boss-henchman, (6) landlordtenant, (7) emperor-subjects, (8) masterservants, (9) guild master-apprentice, (10) trader-consumer, (11) employer-employee, (12) senior-subordinate, (13) capitalist-laborer, (14) parent company-subsidary company, (15) neighbourhood, (16) individual-society, (17) friendship, (18) teacher-pupil, and (19) godhuman beings.
Results. Data for only younger males are shown in Table 2. They are the most radical of the three groups, older people being the most conservative, and younger female lying between the two Items which were accepted positively were based on true love, gratitude, friendship, obligation, conscience, voluntariness, mutual dependence, and items which were accepted negatively were based on authority, feudality, tradition, “girl”, etc. These results are in marked contrast with the pre-war concept of “on”.

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The present study was aimed at investigating i) the developmental change of the ability for concept learning, especially the ability for retaining the criterion which was acquired through the practice of classification of individual cases; ii) the effect of practice without external reinforcement on concept learning.
Twenty-five 1st-graders, 22 3rd-graders, 18 5th-graders and 10 undergraduate students served as Ss. In the preliminary experiment Ss performed a simple concept learning task to acquaint themselves with the experimental situation of concept learning. Eight Ss could not reach the criterion of success in this task and were excluded from the main experiment that followed.
In the main experiment 32 cards were presented, on each of which was drawn a pair of stimuli that varied on 4 binary dimensions. Ss were asked to compare two stimuli (X_i, X_j) in terms of the relation, >, =or<. The rule was that “if X_i, X_j∈A or X_i, X_j∈A, then X_i=X_j” and that “if X_i∈A and X_j∈A, then X_i>X_j”. It was also informed that the positive value on one dimension defined class A, while two of 4 dimensions were distinctively irrelevant, the remaining two covaried in 7/8 of the trials, making it difficult to determine a relevant dimension.
Ss who reached the criterion of 14/16 correct responses before the termination of the reinforced practice after 4 round exposures were given trials without external reinforcement. They were tested as for the ability to judge pairs of new stimuli, for which none of the 4 dimensions correlated with each other, on the basis of one relevant cue disregarding the other, Some of them were also given “practice in conflict situations” -in which two apparently valid criteria would lead to the opposite conclusion-and were asked to verbalize “his” critetrion of a class (both without confirming information).
The results were as follows:
i) The proportion of Ss who reached the criterion was highly correlated with age. Of 23 1st-graders only 5 reached the criterion, while 13 of 19 3rd-graders and 13 of 16 5th-graders could identify the correct criterion. All of the undergraduates succceed in learning with about 1/10 of the average errors made by elementary school pupils.
ii) It was very difficult for elementary school pupils to disregard one of the two apparently relevant cues in the experiment. Only 4 out of 31 who had reached the criterion showed a consistent response pattern based on correct criterion from the beginning of trials without reinforcement. On the contrary, 8 of 9 undergraduate students showed such a pattern. This result might be interpreted that young children judged on cumulative intuitive impression, lacking a deliberately selected hypotheses. Children who could respond correctly when the relevant cue was explicitly present often based their judgment on another apparently relevant cue when values of relevant dimension were the same in both of the paired stimuli.
iii) In the process of judgment without confirming information, however, lack of consistency in children's response patterns gradually decreased. On test trials given after 36 or less trials without reinforcement, 11 out of 27 pupils could disregard irrelevant cue completely. This imrovement of performance without external reinforcement seemed to be essentially the same process as the acqusition of conservation by Smedslund's “practice in conflict situations”.

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The present study was conducted to investigate the avoidance of feminine toys by kindergarten boys as a function of: (a) adult presence or absence, and (b) the adult's expressed attitudes (strictness, permissiveness, and “neutral”) towards inappropriate sex-typing. An attempt was made to measure boys' avoidance of the feminine toys uncontaminated by their preference for sex-appropriate toys. The design of this study was a 2 (presenceabsence)×3 (strictness, permissiveness, and control) design. Sixty kindergarten boys between ages 5-2 to 6-0 with a mean age of 5-6 were assigned randomly to each of six groups of equal size. Following the observation of the adult's attitudes toward inappropriately sex-typed behavior by another young child, S was offeredtwo groups of toys, feminine toys and “neutral” toys. No masculine toys were available. One-half of the Ss played with toys in the presence of the adult and the other half of the Ss in the absence of the adult experimenter. S's play behavior was recorded once every 10 seconds for 7 minutes in terms of predetermined behavior categories by judges who observed the session through a one-way mirror. Two scores were derived from the observation-latency scores and percent-feminine scores. Latency scores consisted of the number of time intervals elapsing before S was observed to look at, come close to, or touch a feminine toy. Percent-feminine scores consisted of the number of intervals in which S looked at, was close to, or touched a feminine toy divided by the number of intervals spent with all toys.
The major findings of the study were as follows:
(a) Whether the adult was permissive or strict, Ss in the adult presence condition showed a stronger avoidance of femmine toys than Ss in the adult-absence condition.
(b) For both the adult-presence and absence condition, the magnitude of the latency scores were in the order of looking, position, and touching (small to large). However, time elapsing between the beginning of S's looking at and approaching the feminine toys tended to be longer for the adult-presence condition than the adult-absence condition.
(c) Both the latency and percent-feminine scores revealed that the strict attitudes expressed by the adult toward sex-typing had an effect to strengthen the avoidance of the feminine toys in Ss while the permissive attitudes had a disinhibitory effect on inappropriately sex-typed responses.
(d) The inhibitory effect of the strict attitudes was most clearly shown in the touching scores. The group differences with respect to the adult's attitudes were least shown in the data for the looking scores.

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