Details of a Researcher - Imai, Mutsumi

Papers - Imai, Mutsumi

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Word learning without aid from syntax: How do Japanese children learn proper nouns and common nouns?

Etsuko Haryu, Mutsumi Imai

The Proceedings of the 23rd Boston University Conference on Language Development 277-288 1999

Research paper (conference, symposium, etc.), Joint Work, Accepted

Children are known to use multiple sources of knowledge to constrain word meanings. Among these sources, syntactic knowledge, semantic knowledge, and familiarity have been noted as particularly important. For example, when a novel count noun is given to an unfamiliar object, English-speaking children interpret the noun as referring to an object category. When a label is given to a familiar object in the “This is X” frame, children tend to interpret it as either a proper name or a property name depending on whether the referent object is animate or inanimate (Hall, 1991, 1994; Gelman & Taylor, 1984). However, in Japanese, this clue from syntax is unavailable since the Japanese language does not have grammatical markers flagging the distinction between count nouns and mass nouns or between proper nouns and common nouns. How Japanese 2- and 4-year-olds assign meaning to novel nouns that were associated with familiar and unfamiliar animals and inanimate objects was studied in this research. The results demonstrated that in the absence of useful information from syntax, Japanese children are able to fast-map a noun to its meaning by elegantly coordinating word learning biases and other available sources of information.

1999

「前」「後」「左」「右」の意味－認知心理学的アプローチによる考察－

今井むつみ, 石崎　俊

Keio SFC Review 4 72-79 1999

Joint Work

A Model of Children's Vocabulary Acquisition using Inductive Logic Programming

K Furukawa, I Kobayasi, T Ozaki, M Imai

The 2nd International Conference on Discovery Science 1999

Joint Work

機械学習システムによる幼児の言語獲得のモデル化

今井むつみ, 小林　郁夫，古川　康一，尾崎　知伸

第13回　人工知能学会　全国大会 1999

Joint Work

認知発達

(平凡社) 1998

Single Work

1997.03

Research paper (scientific journal)

ことばの学習の制約の起源

認知科学 4 75-98 1997

Single Work, Accepted

Researchers have agreed that children learn words in a principled (e.g., Carey, 1982; Markman, 1989). Several important word learning principles, including the whole object assumption, the taxonomic assumption, the shape bias, the mutual exclusivity assumption, have been suggested (Markman, 1989, 1992; Landau, Smith, & Jones, 1998; Imai, Gentner, & Uchida, 1994). However, there has been an unsettled debate in the literature as to the exact nature of these principles, particularly with respect to their origin. In this paper, I discuss the origin of the whole object assumption and taxonomic assumption, especially in light of innateness and domain-specificity. Reviewing the literature of children’s early word production and comprehension and that of crosslinguistic comparison of early vocabulary development, I suggest that the whole-object and taxonomic assumptions are likely to be universally applied independent of the structure of linguistic input but that these principles are not necessarily applied at the onset of word learning. I argue that it is not likely that the whole-object and taxonomic assumptions are innately specified as abstract rules. I argue that these word-learning principles are formed from a combination of domain general, basic cognitive facilities (such as detecting similarity among entities and putting similar things together to form categories, and extracting and generating abstract rules from a small amount of experience) and domain specific, pre-linguistically available ontological knowledge about the world. Finally, I evaluate the necessity of the whole-object assumption and the taxonomic assumption in the face of the position that social-pragmatic force is sufficient to guide word learning. Keywords: word learning principle (語意学習原理), whole object assumption (事物全体原理), taxonomic assumption(事物カテゴリー原理), innateness(生得性), domain-specificity (領域固有性)

A crosslinguistic study on constraints on early word meaning: Linguistic influence vs. universal ontology

Dedre Gentner, Mutsumi Imai

Cognition 62 169-200 1997

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted

Asymmetry in the taxonomic assumption: word learning vs. property induction

IMAI MUTSUMI

Child Language Research Forum 27 157-167 1996

Research paper (scientific journal), Single Work, Accepted

This research has examined whether there is an asymmetry in children’s and adults’ notion of “likeness” in making inferences about the extension of a novel word and in making inferences about novel properties of objects. Recent research studying children’s word learning has suggested that children of preschool age rely on shape similarity rather than taxonomic relations when the two aspects are separated (e.g., Baldwin, 1992; Imai, Gentner & Uchida, 1994). In contrast, a body of work by Gelman has shown persuasively that even 2-year-olds project a property of an object onto other objects sharing the same label in spite of misleading perceptual similarity. This discrepancy between the results from the word extension studies and those from Gelman’s induction studies suggest that children use different criteria in determining “likeness” an across two situations (cf. Gelman, Coleman & MaCoby, 1986; Gelman & Medin, 1993). To examine this, four studies were conducted with Japanese 5-year-olds and adults on the item sets in which conceptual similarity and perceptual similarity conflicted . Children as well as adults shifted relative weight placed between shape similarity and conceptual similarity across the word learning task and the property inference task, relying on shape similarity more heavily in the former task. I argue that this asymmetry reflects children’s appreciation that shape has strong predictive power for inferring category-membership but not for inferring shared properties. Furthermore, the results suggested that children know how the relative weight between shape and conceptual similarity should be shifted across natural kinds and artifacts. I conclude that children’s word meaning and concept learning is theory-driven and principled not because they can bypass perceptual similarity but because they know, just like adults, when they should and should not rely on perceptual similarity.

On the equivalence of superoridinate concepts. Cognition

Edward Wisniewski, Lyman Casey,Mutsumi Imai

Cognition 60 269-298 1996

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted

Psychological studies of superordinates have generally treated them as equivalent. However, many languages distinguish mass superordinates (e.g., clothing) from count superordinates (e.g., vehicle). In the present paper, experimental evidence is presented which suggests that the two types of superordinates are conceptually distinct as well. One study showed that the members of mass superordinates more often co-occur. A second study showed that people more often interact with the members of mass superordinates in temporal proximity whereas people primarily interact with single members of count superordinates on a specific occasion. Also, properties that characterize an individual are more salient aspect of count superordinates. These findings imply that mass superordinates refer to unindividuates groups of objects, united by spatial and functional contiguity. Two other studies supported this hypothesis by showing that the class inclusion relation between a single object and a category is stronger for count superordinates. Taken together, the findings suggest that mass superordinates are not true taxonomic categories. We relate the findings to previous views of superordinates and to the count/mass distinction in general.

幼児における助数詞の獲得過程 --- 生物カテゴリーの形成と助数詞付与ルールの獲得

IMAI MUTSUMI

教育心理学研究 44 126-135 1996

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted

This research examined the acquisition of human/animal numerical classifier categories in preschool children. In Experiment 1, using an error detection paradigm, we examined the developmental change of the knowledge 150 children possessed about classifiers. Overall, even the youngest group of children (early 4-years-olds) were aware of the grammatical function of classifiers, but they did not know the semantic criteria for each classifier category until around their late 5 years of age. Experiment 2 examined 60 4- and 5-years-olds who had not shown the sensitivity for the semantic rule dividing the hiki (small animal) category and the tou (large animal) category. The results showed that the 5-years-olds only, could spontaneously generate the correct rules and apply it to new items only through hearing adults’ use of classifiers. Based on such results, the interplay between the linguistic input, grammar and extra-linguistic cognitive categories in acquisition of classifiers was discussed. Key words: numerical classifier, preschool children, error detection paradigm, semantic rule, interplay between the linguistic input and cognitive categories.

Children's theories of word meanings: The role of shape similarity in early acquisition.

Dedre Gentner，Nobuko Uchida, Mutsumi Imai

Cognitive Development 9 45-75 1994

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted

外国語学習者の語彙学習における問題点 ------ 言葉の意味表象の見地から ------

IMAI MUTSUMI

教育心理学研究 41 245-253 1993

Research paper (scientific journal), Single Work, Accepted

The present study investigated how the frequently used English word wear is understood by American students and Japanese college students studying English as a second language. The results of the two experiments revealed very different patterns between the native speakers and the L2 learners. The American students knew almost all of the senses of the word wear whether used in their concrete, prototypical senses or metaphorically extended senses and grouped the different senses into tightly cohesive clusters, which in turn comprised an orderly structured category of the word as a whole. In contrast, the Japanese students’ understanding of the word was extremely impoverished, consisting only of the senses corresponding to the Japanese word “kiru”. The pattern obtained for the native speakers was consistent with a recently proposed theory treating word meaning as a structured category with single or multiple prototypes. The large difference observed between native speakers and Japanese students in understanding the meaning of a basic, frequent word such as wear points to the problem of traditional vocabulary instruction in second language class-rooms, which exclusively relies on dictionary definitions. Key words: second language, vocabulary instruction, word meaning, polysemy, structured category.

Properties of attention during reading lessons

Richard　Anderson., Ian　Willkinson　& Huajin　Yi , Mutsumi Imai

Journal of Educational Psychology 84 160-173 1992

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted

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