Do Bilinguals Acquire Similar Words to Monolinguals? An Examination of Word Acquisition and the Similarity Effect in Japanese-English Bilinguals' Vocabularies

Previous research has paid much attention to the overall acquisition of vocabularies among bilingual children in comparison to their monolingual counterparts. Much less attention has been paid to the type of words acquired and the possible transfer or cross-linguistic effects of the other language on vocabulary development. Thus, this study aims to explore similarities and dissimilarities in the vocabularies of simultaneous bilinguals and Japanese monolinguals and considers the possible cross-linguistic similarity effect on word acquisition. Six simultaneous Japanese-English bilingual children (mean age = 34.75 months (2.56)) were language-age-matched with six Japanese monolinguals; their productive vocabularies were compared regarding size and categories. Additionally, characteristic acquired words were compared using correspondence analyses. Results showed that, although delayed due to the reduced inputs, young bilinguals have a similar set of vocabularies in terms of word category as monolinguals. However, bilingual children's vocabularies reflect their unevenly distributed experience with the language. Fewer interactive experiences with language speakers may result in a lower acquisition of interactive words. Furthermore, there is a cross-linguistic effect on acquisition, likely caused by form similarity between Japanese katakana words and English words. Even between languages with great dissimilarities, resources and cues are sought and used to facilitate bilingual vocabulary acquisition.

Revival of Historical Kana Orthography in a Patient with Allographic Agraphia

Japanese people born before World War II learned Japanese kana (Japanese syllabograms) writing in a style that is not currently used. These individuals had to learn the current style of kana orthography after the war. An 85-year-old man was taken to our hospital by his family who were surprised by his diary. It was written with kanji (Japanese ideograms) and katakana using the prewar style. A neuropsychological examination revealed impaired recall of hiragana. Neuroimaging studies revealed atrophy of the left fronto-parietal lobe and hypoperfusion of the left frontal lobe. His allographic agraphia might have resulted from the disturbance of the current style of kana orthography.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging of neural activity related to orthographic, phonological, and lexico-semantic judgments of visually presented characters and words

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to investigate neural activity during the judgment of visual stimuli in two groups of experiments using seven and five normal subjects. The subjects were given tasks designed differentially to involve orthographic (more generally, visual form), phonological, and lexico-semantic processes. These tasks included the judgments of whether a line was horizontal, whether a pseudocharacter or pseudocharacter string included a horizontal line, whether a Japanese katakana (phonogram) character or character string included a certain vowel, or whether a character string was meaningful (noun or verb) or meaningless. Neural activity related to the visual form process was commonly observed during judgments of both single real-characters and single pseudocharacters in lateral extrastriate visual cortex, the posterior ventral or medial occipito-temporal area, and the posterior inferior temporal area of both hemispheres. In contrast, left-lateralized activation was observed in the latter two areas during judgments of real- and pseudo-character strings. These results show that there is no katakana "word form center" whose activity is specific to real words. Activation related to the phonological process was observed, in Broca's area, the insula, the supramarginal gyrus, and the posterior superior temporal area, with greater activation in the left hemisphere. These activation foci for visual form and phonological processes of katakana also were reported for the English alphabet in previous studies. The present activation showed no additional areas for contrasts of noun judgment with other conditions and was similar between noun and verb judgment tasks, suggesting two possibilities: no strong semantic activation was produced, or the semantic process shared activation foci with the phonological process.