Considers the fact that prosody is a grammatical (phonological) structure that must be parsed. The article describes prosodic categories marked by intonational pattern for English and Japanese, concentrates on "pitch accent" and tonally marked "phrases," and discusses potential ambiguities in parsing these categories. (60…

This "insider's guide" to American and Japanese communication and misunderstanding is based on the premise that Americans and Japanese have different goals in communication; the American goal is to make messages negotiated between individuals explicit, while the Japanese goal is to keep messages implicit and assumed within the group. In…

This paper examines two studies on language development and narrative discourse structure by looking at how language shapes and is shaped by culture-specific experiences. Conversations between 20 middle-class Japanese preschoolers, aged 4-5 years old, and their mothers were analyzed to study differences in narrative elicitation by mothers towards…

Investigates the effect of oral and electronic media on interaction patterns by learners of Japanese as a second language. The framework for the analysis of learner is speech act theory, which provides a richly developed set of descriptive categories by which to examine interactional processes. (Author/JL)

This paper discusses common miscommunication problems that occur between Japanese and Americans, even when both are speaking Japanese, with a focus on high contextuality and women's position in business organizations. It also examines how these cultural differences can be addressed through the use of videotaped conversations. One of the preeminent…

This paper considers how multilingualism is approached in both Japan and the United States by considering the position and roles of the government, schools, and public. There exists the perception in countries where monolingualism is considered the norm that bilingualism, and certainly multilingualism, are problematic. Multilingualism in a…