言語発達初期における語の意味の未分化性と可塑的変化：「胚性詞」仮説の検証に向けて

京都大学新制・課程博士博士(人間・環境学)甲第23264号人博第979号新制||人||232(附属図書館)2020||人博||979(吉田南総合図書館)京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科相関環境学専攻(主査)教授 阪上 雅昭, 教授 谷口 一美, 准教授 森口 佑介学位規則第4条第1項該当Doctor of Human and Environmental StudiesKyoto UniversityDGA

Data from “Object Labeling Activates Young Children’s Scale Errors at an Early Stage of Verb Vocabulary Growth”

When young children develop the ability to represent and interact with objects, scale errors, in which they attempt to act on miniature-sized artifacts in an impossible manner, are often observed. To investigate the relationships between scale errors and semantic representations activated by lexical cues, we performed studies while manipulating whether object labeling was provided (the noun and pronoun conditions) as a within-participant factor (Hagihara et al., 2022). The dataset included the scale error production of 72 Japanese toddlers aged from 18 to 30 months, with their vocabulary measures. This dataset is freely available so that other developmental psychologists can address related research questions

Looking represents choosing in toddlers: Exploring the equivalence between multimodal measures in forced‐choice tasks

In the two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) paradigm, manual responses such as pointing have been widely used as measures to estimate cognitive abilities. While pointing measurements can be easily collected, coded, analyzed, and interpreted, absent responses are often observed particularly when adopting these measures for toddler studies, which leads to an increase of missing data. Although looking responses such as preferential looking can be available as alternative measures in such cases, it is unknown how well looking measurements can be interpreted as equivalent to manual ones. This study aimed to answer this question by investigating how accurately pointing responses (i.e., left or right) could be predicted from concurrent preferential looking. Using pre-existing videos of toddlers aged 18-23 months engaged in an intermodal word comprehension task, we developed models predicting manual from looking responses. Results showed substantial prediction accuracy for both the Simple Majority Vote and Machine Learning-Based classifiers, which indicates that looking responses would be reasonable alternative measures of manual ones. However, the further exploratory analysis revealed that when applying the created models for data of toddlers who did not produce clear pointing responses, the estimation agreement of missing pointing between the models and the human coders slightly dropped. This indicates that looking responses without pointing were qualitatively different from those with pointing. Bridging two measurements in forced-choice tasks would help researchers avoid wasting collected data due to the absence of manual responses and interpret results from different modalities comprehensively

COVID-19 school and kindergarten closure relates to children's social relationships: a longitudinal study in Japan

新型コロナウイルスによるパンデミック下の子どもの社会性発達 --社会情緒的行動と他者との心理的距離の変化--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2022-01-25.The COVID-19 pandemic has led children to experience school closures. Although increasing evidence suggests that such intense social quarantine influences children’s social relationships with others, longitudinal studies are limited. Using longitudinal data collected during (T1) and after (T2) intensive school closure and home confinement, this study investigated the impacts of social quarantine on children’s social relationships. Japanese parents of children aged 0–9 years (n = 425) completed an online questionnaire that examined children’s socio-emotional behavior and perceived proximity to parents or others. The results demonstrated that social quarantine was not significantly related to children’s socio-emotional behavior across all age groups. However, changes in children’s perceived proximity varied depending on certain age-related factors: elementary schoolers’ perceived closeness to parents significantly decreased after the reopening of schools, whereas that to others, such as peers, increased. Such effects were not observed in infants and preschoolers. The follow-up survey 9-month after the reopening of schools (T3; n = 130) did not detect significant differences in both children’s socio-emotional behavior and perceived proximity from that after the intense quarantine. These findings suggest that school closure and home confinement may have influenced children’s social development differently across their age, and its effects were larger in perceived closeness rather than social behavior

Labeling effects on scale errors

The dataset and analysis codes for the study investigated the effect of object labeling on scale error production

Computer Vision-Based Approach for Quantifying Occupational Therapists’ Qualitative Evaluations of Postural Control

This study aimed to leverage computer vision (CV) technology to develop a technique for quantifying postural control. A conventional quantitative index, occupational therapists’ qualitative clinical evaluations, and CV-based quantitative indices using an image analysis algorithm were applied to evaluate the postural control of 34 typically developed preschoolers. The effectiveness of the CV-based indices was investigated relative to current methods to explore the clinical applicability of the proposed method. The capacity of the CV-based indices to reflect therapists’ qualitative evaluations was confirmed. Furthermore, compared to the conventional quantitative index, the CV-based indices provided more detailed quantitative information with lower costs. CV-based evaluations enable therapists to quantify details of motor performance that are currently observed qualitatively. The development of such precise quantification methods will improve the science and practice of occupational therapy and allow therapists to perform to their full potential

Data_Sheet_1_Mask wearing in Japanese and French nursery schools: The perceived impact of masks on communication.pdf

Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, covering the mouth region with a face mask became pervasive in many regions of the world, potentially impacting how people communicate with and around children. To explore the characteristics of this masked communication, we asked nursery school educators, who have been at the forefront of daily masked interaction with children, about their perception of daily communicative interactions while wearing a mask in an online survey. We collected data from French and Japanese nursery school educators to gain an understanding of commonalities and differences in communicative behavior with face masks given documented cultural differences in pre-pandemic mask wearing habits, face scanning patterns, and communicative behavior. Participants (177 French and 138 Japanese educators) reported a perceived change in their own communicative behavior while wearing a mask, with decreases in language quantity and increases in language quality and non-verbal cues. Comparable changes in their team members’ and children’s communicative behaviors were also reported. Moreover, our results suggest that these changes in educators’ communicative behaviors are linked to their attitudes toward mask wearing and their potential difficulty in communicating following its use. These findings shed light on the impact of pandemic-induced mask wearing on children’s daily communicative environment.</p