This dissertation study explores a young Japanese heritage language speaker's learning process of formal writing in Japanese. With a rapid increase in immigrants into the U.S. and growing importance of diversity, many researchers have shown interest in immigrant children, i.e., heritage speakers, from educational and research perspectives and have…

Tense/aspect morphology on verbs is often thought to depend on event features like telicity, but it is not known how speakers identify these features in visual scenes. To examine this question, we asked Japanese speakers to describe computer-generated animations of simple actions with variation in visual features related to telicity. Experiments…

This conversation analytic study investigates the use of the Japanese contrastive marker "demo" "but" as a preface to responses to polar questions. "Demo"-prefaced responses are one type of nonconforming answers, that is, responses that provide (dis)affirmation to preceding questions without yes/no-tokens. This study…

This study reports on findings from two experiments investigating the interpretive patterns of overt pronouns in an embedded subject position with three types of matrix subjects (i.e. a referential NP, a quantified NP, or a "wh"-phrase) in Mandarin, English, and Japanese. According to the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC), overt pronouns in…

This study explores a Japanese-Korean-English trilingual Asian-American child's identity negotiation in a multicultural book club. Drawing upon the conception of "figured world" (Holland et al. 1998. "Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds." Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), it investigates how the book club as "a…

Background: The medical information about anemia prevention produced by health-care professionals is difficult to understand because of its complicated terminology. Purpose: To evaluate quantitatively for the first time the clarity of existing online information about anemia prevention in Japanese. Methods: On January 20, 2023, we used the keyword…

While it is generally agreed that higher education is a public good and produces public goods, it remains unclear what this means. An important reason for the unclarity is the conceptual ambiguity and cultural nuances of the concept of the public good in higher education. Coupled with the Western dominance of discourse in higher education and…

Phonological models of early word learning often assume that child forms can be understood as structural mappings from their adult targets. In contrast, the whole-word phonology model suggests that on beginning word production children represent adult targets as holistic units, reflecting not the exact sound sequence but only the most perceptually…

The current dissertation investigates factors that influence usages of Japanese honorifics and explores how instructors can introduce honorifics more effectively to second-language learners. Apart from existing literature, my data includes a corpus of real-life usages of Modern Japanese, classroom observations, interviews with Japanese language…

Plagiarism has been among the top forms of academic misconduct. Detective, reactive and proactive measures are taken to mitigate plagiarism in scholarly works. Text-matching tools play a significant role in the detection of plagiarism. Many studies have tested the performance of text-matching tools in detecting plagiarism from various…

Natural language is known to play a crucial and specific role for children's learning in school mathematics. Not only does it carry special vocabulary, but subtle differences between natural languages may lead to surprising challenges, for instance, for learners who are not taught mathematics in their mother tongue. In this paper, the…

As the objective of language teaching is shifting from producing so-called "native-like" speakers to fostering speakers competent in intercultural communication, it has become necessary to identify the kinds of learning resources that may be related to the learner's development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in today's…

Purpose: In this article, I explore how critical realism influenced the methods and methodology as well as the translations of interviews from Japanese into English and the interpretations of teachers' understanding of the school at the center of this research. Design/methodology/approach: This article investigates the interaction of critical…

In a replication of Daly and K. Dounavi (2020), the researchers evaluated the effect of foreign tact and bidirectional intraverbal teaching on the emergence of untaught relations. Three university students learned three stimulus sets through three types of teaching: native-foreign intraverbal teaching (vocalizing Spanish words that refer to a…

Nature and time have long been key concepts of educational thought. Educational thinkers from both the East and the West have tried to imitate and follow nature (conceived as "tien" or "physis"). They have also considered time in relation to human formation and growth. This article attempts to connect these two key concepts of…