Two stories,one vision: A plea for an ecological turn in intercultural communication

This paper calls for a “fifth moment” in the field of intercultural communication that re-examines modern culture’s values, beliefs, and assumptions about human being in the world and the role of such in fomenting today’s ongoing planetary-wide ecological crises. To conduct this re-examination, we turn to ethnoautobiography, a framework rooted in story and in the indigenous paradigm. We raise deep questions regarding the default assumptions of a discipline ensconced almost exclusively within the monocultural logic of modern culture and civilization. We end by posing key problematics that we deem crucial for renewing the discipline toward contemporary relevance, ecological awareness, and responsibility.     

Japanese female Kendo practitioners are associated with high radial bone mineral density

Osteopenia is a condition in which bone mineral density (BMD) is lower than normal. Exercise increases BMD in both the young and adults. This study aimed to compare the radial apparent BMD (aBMD) in Japanese females who are Kendo practitioners (KPs) and those with no regular exercise habits (no-REH). The analysis participants consisted of 45 KPs (mean age: 49.4 years old) and 110 no-REH (mean age: 48.8 years old). Radial aBMD was measured using an ultrasonic bone densitometry system. Radial aBMD in KPs was 196.1 ± 33.9 mg/cm³, and was 182.9 ± 45.3 mg/cm³ in no-REH participants. KPs had significantly higher BMD than no-REH participants. In KPs, left radial aBMD was 196.1 ± 33.9 mg/cm³, and right radial aBMD was 184.5 ± 37.7 mg/cm³. The left radius was also significantly higher than the right radius with respect to aBMD in KPs. After adjusting for age, body mass index, menstrual status, parous women and frequency of milk and dairy intake, the odds ratio (OR) of osteopenia associated with no-REH was 6.58 (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.72–25.1) and the prevalence ratio (PR) of osteopenia associated with no-REH was 4.12 (95% CI: 1.23–13.7). Therefore, the Kendo practice may have a protective efficacy for osteopenia in women.     

Teachers’ skill ratings of children with learning disabilities: A comparison of the United States and Japan

This study compared U.S. and Japanese grade school teachers’ perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of children in their classrooms identified as fitting commonly used criteria for a learning disability. U.S. teachers identified 4.0 percent of their children as meeting the criteria and Japanese teachers identified 1.5 percent. The teachers then rated these children’s abilities in the areas of listening, speaking, reading/writing, reasoning, mathematics, social, and study skills. Overall, U.S. and Japanese teachers’ rating patterns were similar on 70 percent of the skills. In most areas where significant differences were found—listening, speaking, reading/writing and study skills—U.S. teachers rated higher percentages of their children as “weaker” than Japanese teachers. A noteworthy exception was the area of social skills where Japanese children received higher percentages of “weak” ratings. U.S. and Japanese teachers also differed in their perceptions of causative factors leading to their children’s learning difficulties. We discuss the findings in terms of U.S.-Japanese differences in writing systems and cultural expectations.     

Mapping novel nouns and verbs onto dynamic action events: are verb meanings easier to learn than noun meanings for Japanese children?

The present research examined how 3- and 5-year-old Japanese children map novel nouns and verbs onto dynamic action events and generalize them to new instances. Studies 1 to 3 demonstrated that although both 3- and 5-year-olds were able to map novel nouns onto novel objects, only 5-year-olds could generalize verbs solely on the basis of the sameness of the action. Study 4 showed that the difficulty young children experience in learning verbs lies mainly in mapping the appropriate element to a verb rather than in encoding and remembering an action itself. The results of this research are related to a long-debated issue of whether noun learning is privileged over verb learning.     

Novel noun and verb learning in Chinese-, English-, and Japanese-speaking children

When can children speaking Japanese, English, or Chinese map and extend novel nouns and verbs? Across 6 studies, 3‐ and 5‐year‐old children in all 3 languages map and extend novel nouns more readily than novel verbs. This finding prevails even in languages like Chinese and Japanese that are assumed to be verb‐friendly languages (e.g., T. Tardif, 1996 ). The results also suggest that the input language uniquely shapes verb learning such that English‐speaking children require grammatical support to learn verbs, whereas Chinese children require pragmatic as well as grammatical support. This research bears on how universally shared cognitive factors and language‐specific linguistic factors interact in lexical development.     

Neural correlates for numerical processing in the manual mode

This paper reports a study designed to examine the neuronal correlates for comprehending the signs of American Sign Language representing numerals in deaf signers who acquired Japanese Sign Language as their first language. The participants were scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) twice on the day of the experiment. The results of the measurements revealed that upon learning that the signs actually have numeric meaning, a network of brain areas is activated immediately. Many of these areas have been previously implicated in numerical processing. The similar neural network of brain regions responsible for numerical processing exists on a nonlinguistical basis and works to retrieve arithmetic facts from presented linguistic material regardless of the mode of the language.     

Reorganizing the lexicon by learning a new word: Japanese children's interpretation of the meaning of a new word for a familiar artifact

This research investigated how children interpret the meaning of a new word associated with a familiar artifact. The existing literature has shown that syntactic form-class information plays an important role in making this kind of inference. However, this information is not available to Japanese children, because Japanese language does not have a grammatical distinction between count nouns and mass nouns, proper nouns and common nouns, or singular and plural. In Study 1, 12 three-year-old monolingual Japanese children were tested to examine whether they interpreted a new noun associated with a familiar artifact to be a material name or a new label for the object. They interpreted the new word as a new category label for the object, rather than as a name for the material. How children related the new category to the old familiar one was then examined in Studies 2 and 3. The results of Study 2, in which 24 three-year-olds participated, showed that children could flexibly shift between two interpretations using shape information. When the named object had a typical shape for the familiar category, they mapped the new word to a subordinate category. In contrast, when the shape of the named object was atypical, they mapped the new word to a new category that was mutually exclusive to the familiar category by excluding the named object from the familiar category. In Study 3, 12 three-year-olds were tested to examine relative importance of shape and functional information in this inference process. The results of the three studies suggest that children flexibly recruit clues from multiple sources, but the cluesare weighed in hierarchical order so that they can determine the single most plausible solution in a given situation when different clues suggest different solutions.     

Testing for factorial invariance of the Modified Leadership Scale for Sports: using a Japanese version

The objective of this study was to provide empirical evidence to support psychometric properties of a modified four-dimensional model of the Leadership Scale for Sports (LSS). The study tested invariance of all parameters (i.e., factor loadings, error variances, and factor variances–covariances) in the four-dimensional measurement model between two groups of student-athletes. For testing multi-group invariance of the proposed scale, 335 middle school and 320 high school student-athletes in Japan participated in this study. The modified version of the LSS consists of 35 items representing training instruction, democratic behaviour, positive feedback, and social support. A chi-square difference test was employed for model comparisons. The results supported configural, metric, scalar and factor variance–covariance invariance in the modified LSS across the two student-athlete groups.     

Object similarity bootstraps young children to action-based verb extension

Young children often fail to generalize a novel verb based on sameness of action since they have difficulty focusing on the relational similarity across events while at the same time ignoring the objects that are involved. Study 1, with Japanese-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 28 in each group), found that similarity of objects involved in action events plays a scaffolding role in children's extraction of relational similarity across events when they extend a verb. Study 2, with 4-year-olds (N = 47), further showed that repeated experience of action-based verb extension supported by object similarity leads children to be better able to extend a novel verb based on sameness of action, even without support from object similarity.