THE EFFECTS OF ONLINE KATAKANA WORD RECOGNITION TRAINING AMONG NOVICE LEARNERS OF JAPANESE AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Because word recognition processes differ depending on orthographic systems, second language learners with different orthographic backgrounds need to acquire new word recognition strategies suitable to the orthography in their second language. Japanese is a multi-script language and one of the scripts, katakana, is mainly used to transcribe Western loanwords. Due to the sound alternations resulting from the process of borrowing, learners of Japanese often experience difficulties in reading and writing katakana loanwords. Thus, this study investigates the effectiveness of online katakana word recognition training among novice learners of Japanese. Thirty-one students from a first-semester Japanese course at a large research university in the Midwest were randomly divided into three groups and assigned different online training programs outside of the class for four weeks designed to establish sound-letter correspondences of katakana. The first experimental group (Scrambler Group) put the randomly scrambled letters in the right order to form a target katakana loanword by listening to the vocalized word, while the second experimental group (Reading Group) practiced with the same set of the words solely by enunciating and listening to the model reading. The participants took pre- and post-tests before and after the training so that the improvement resulting from the training was observed. The test was composed of two tasks, naming and providing the English meanings of katakana words. The number of correct answers was counted and the response time for a participant to process each word was measured. The test included words practiced in the training and unpracticed words in order to test whether the training effects was transferred to processing unpracticed words

Cross-script cognate priming effects on visual word recognition:Effects of Japanese loanword cognates in L2 Japanese learners

Research in bilingualism has shown that translation pairs that look or sound similar across languages (e.g., English-Spanish rich-rico) are easy to recognize for the speakers of the two languages. Such translation pairs are called cognates and the processing advantage of cognates is known as cognate facilitation effect. This thesis investigated cognate facilitation effect in visual word recognition by examining masked priming effects in beginning English-Japanese bilinguals, namely late second language (L2) learners of Japanese whose first language (L1) is English. More specifically, the current study examined (i) what constitutes cognate facilitation effect in visual word recognition in bilinguals whose two languages share no orthographic similarity and (ii) whether the facilitation effect would be modulated by L2 proficiency by testing two proficiency groups of L2 learners of Japanese. The results from masked priming experiments using English (L1) primes with Japanese (L2) targets showed that priming effects for cognate pairs (e.g., card-カード/ca:do/) were larger than for translation pairs (e.g., desk-つくえ/tukue/) and the effect was smallest for word pairs similar only in sound (e.g., nail-メール/me:ru/,mail). The same patterns of results were obtained for Japanese (L2) primes with English (L1) targets. The size of priming effects did not differ across the two proficiency groups, but significantly larger priming effects were observed in L1-L2 priming direction than in L2-L1 priming direction. These findings indicate that (i) cognate facilitation effect in visual word recognition can be obtained without shared orthography, and shared semantics and phonology underlie the cognate facilitation effect. Further, (ii) the asymmetry in the size of the priming effects in beginning bilinguals may be due to their low L2 proficiency and the fact that sufficient L2 proficiency is required to utilize cognate information from L2 primes in the process of recognizing L1 targets. The findings are discussed in regard to cross-language co-activation and interaction during bilingual lexical processing within the framework of the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA+) model. The role of L2 proficiency in bilingual lexical processing is also considered

Automatic Scaling of Text for Training Second Language Reading Comprehension

For children learning their first language, reading is one of the most effective ways to acquire new vocabulary. Studies link students who read more with larger and more complex vocabularies. For second language learners, there is a substantial barrier to reading. Even the books written for early first language readers assume a base vocabulary of nearly 7000 word families and a nuanced understanding of grammar. This project will look at ways that technology can help second language learners overcome this high barrier to entry, and the effectiveness of learning through reading for adults acquiring a foreign language. Through the implementation of Dokusha, an automatic graded reader generator for Japanese, this project will explore how advancements in natural language processing can be used to automatically simplify text for extensive reading in Japanese as a foreign language

日本語語彙特性のデータベースの構築―その基礎枠組み及び主要中核要素の概観―

In order to be able to conduct meaningful research into all aspects of language, it is essential for language science and cognitive science researchers to have practicalaccess to an increasingly wider range of detailed and contemporary information about their target languages. Against that background, this paper presents a short overview summary of an ongoing project to construct a largescale database of Japanese lexical properties (JLP). More specifically, after outlining the concurrent construction of the ontology of Japanese lexical properties (JLP-O; Joyce & Hodošček, 2014), which provides the basic guiding framework for the JLP database construction project, the paper also outlines the initial core components of the JLP database, with particular emphasis on two of those components;namely, a database of semantic transparency (ST) ratings for approximately 10,000 two-kanji compound words and some initial results for the extraction and automatic analyses of the word structures of both three- and fourkanji compound words.言語科学者や認知科学者にとって，言語のあらゆる側面について有意義な研究を企図するためには，目的とする言語に関する詳細かつ現代的な幅広い情報に実用可能なレベルでアクセスできることが必要不可欠である。このことを背景として，本稿では，日本語の語彙特性に関する大規模データベースの構築を目指して現在進行中のプロジェクトについての概要を説明する。具体的には，この日本語語彙特性データベース構築プロジェクトに対して基本的な枠組みを提供する，日本語語彙特性に関するオントロジー（Joyce & Hodošček, 2014）の構築について概観したのちに，日本語語彙特性データベースの主要中核要素について略述する。特に，約10,000 の漢字二字熟語に対する意味的透明性の評定データベースと，漢字三字および四字の熟語の抽出とその語構造に対する自動分析に関する主要な結果という2 種類の中核要素を取り上げて論じる

Mostly-Unsupervised Statistical Segmentation of Japanese Kanji Sequences

Given the lack of word delimiters in written Japanese, word segmentation is generally considered a crucial first step in processing Japanese texts. Typical Japanese segmentation algorithms rely either on a lexicon and syntactic analysis or on pre-segmented data; but these are labor-intensive, and the lexico-syntactic techniques are vulnerable to the unknown word problem. In contrast, we introduce a novel, more robust statistical method utilizing unsegmented training data. Despite its simplicity, the algorithm yields performance on long kanji sequences comparable to and sometimes surpassing that of state-of-the-art morphological analyzers over a variety of error metrics. The algorithm also outperforms another mostly-unsupervised statistical algorithm previously proposed for Chinese. Additionally, we present a two-level annotation scheme for Japanese to incorporate multiple segmentation granularities, and introduce two novel evaluation metrics, both based on the notion of a compatible bracket, that can account for multiple granularities simultaneously.Comment: 22 pages. To appear in Natural Language Engineerin

Methods for Efficient Ontology Lexicalization for Non-Indo-European Languages: The Case of Japanese

Lanser B. Methods for Efficient Ontology Lexicalization for Non-Indo-European Languages: The Case of Japanese. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2017.In order to make the growing amount of conceptual knowledge available through ontologies and datasets accessible to humans, NLP applications need access to information on how this knowledge can be verbalized in natural language. One way to provide this kind of information are ontology lexicons, which apart from the actual verbalizations in a given target language can provide further, rich linguistic information about them. Compiling such lexicons manually is a very time-consuming task and requires expertise both in Semantic Web technologies and lexicon engineering, as well as a very good knowledge of the target language at hand. In this thesis we present two alternative approaches to generating ontology lexicons by means of crowdsourcing on the one hand and through the framework M-ATOLL on the other hand. So far, M-ATOLL has been used with a number of Indo-European languages that share a large set of common characteristics. Therefore, another focus of this work will be the generation of ontology lexicons specifically for Non-Indo-European languages. In order to explore these two topics, we use both approaches to generate Japanese ontology lexicons for the DBpedia ontology: First, we use CrowdFlower to generate a small Japanese ontology lexicon for ten exemplary ontology elements according to a two-stage workflow, the main underlying idea of which is to turn the task of generating lexicon entries into a translation task; the starting point of this translation task is a manually created English lexicon for DBpedia. Next, we adapt M-ATOLL's corpus-based approach to being used with Japanese, and use the adapted system to generate two lexicons for five example properties, respectively. Aspects of the DBpedia system that require modifications for being used with Japanese include the dependency patterns employed by M-ATOLL to extract candidate verbalizations from corpus data, and the templates used to generate the actual lexicon entries. Comparison of the lexicons generated by both approaches to manually created gold standards shows that both approaches are viable options for the generation of ontology lexicons also for Non-Indo-European languages

ミャンマー語テキストの形式手法による音節分割、正規化と辞書順排列

国立大学法人長岡技術科学大

The extraction, introduction, transfer, diffusion and integration of loanwords in Japan : loanwords in a literate society.

This doctoral thesis seeks primarily to establish a model which shows how loanwords in Japanese evolve through a stepwise process. The process starts well before the actual borrowing itself, when Japanese school children acquire a stratum of English morphemes to which conventional pronunciations have been ascribed. This stratum could be said to be composed of a large set of orthography-pronunciation analogies. Foreign words are then extracted from foreign word stocks by agents of introduction, typically advertising copywriters or magazine journalists. However, since these words are unsuitable for use in Japanese as is, the agents then proceed to domesticate them according to Japanese rules of phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax and semantics. The next step involves transference into the public zone, crucially via the written word, before being disseminated and finally integrated. A few researchers have hinted that such a process exists but have taken it no further. Here, proof is evinced by interviews with the agents themselves and together with documentary and quantitative corpus analyses it is shown that lexical borrowing of western words in Japanese proceeds in accordance with such a model. It is furthermore shown that these agents adhere to one of three broad cultural environments and borrow/domesticate words within this genre. They then pass along channels of tran,~ference, dissemination and integration in accordance with genre specific patterns. Investigation of these genre-specific channels of evolution constitutes the second research objective. Three other research objectives are addressed within the framework of this model, namely genre-specific patterns of transference and dissemination, when a word changes from being a foreign word to being an integrated loanword, and factors governing the displacement of native words by loanwords