Misperception of voiced and voiceless obstruent length in Italian by native Italian and native Japanese speakers was compared. Both Italian and Japanese use consonant length contrastively. This may lead to the expectation that there is a positive first language transfer for the native Japanese speakers. While the native Japanese listeners’ misperception of Italian length categories was limited, they still made significantly more errors than the native Italian listeners. The native Japanese listeners’ length misperception was more noticeable when the word-medial obstruent was short than when it was long and when it was voiced than when it was voiceless.
The Ikema dialect of Miyako, Southern Ryukyuan, has a three-pattern accent system in which three tone classes (Types A, B, and C) are lexically contrastive, although the Type A nouns are fewer. The biased distribution of tone classes is a consequence of a diachronic change whereby Types A and B merged together. This study aims to confirm that the original three-pattern system in Ikema retains the proto-Ryukyuan system and to demonstrate that a set of words that are originally of Type A and share specific meanings are not merged into Type B.
To elucidate the neural basis of stuttering, brain activation for reading words was compared between adults who do and do not stutter (AWS/ANS) with functional MRI. Japanese native speakers read aloud familiar (F), unfamiliar (U) and pseudo(P) words of 4 or 5 syllables. P contained much fewer native syllable sequences than F or U. F primarily activated the left angular/supramarginal gyri (lAG/SMG), U Broca’s area, and P the left ventral premotor/motor areas (lvPMA/MA), respectively, in ANS. AWS showed lower activation in lAG/SMG and Broca’s area, but higher activation in lvPMA/MA, implying that AWS cannot read native syllable sequences as efficiently as ANS.
