Biomedical subjects

Takao Fushimi

Publications and source records attributed to Takao Fushimi.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

The functional unit in phonological encoding: evidence for moraic representation in native Japanese speakers.

Speech production studies have shown that the phonological form of a word is made up of phonemic segments in stress-timed languages (e.g., Dutch) and of syllables in syllable-timed languages (e.g., Chinese). To clarify the functional unit of mora-timed languages, the authors asked native Japanese speakers to perform an implicit priming task (A. S. Meyer, 1990, 1991). In Experiment 1, participants could speed up their production latencies when initial consonant and vowel (CV) of a target word were known in advance but failed to do so when the vowel was unknown. In Experiment 2, prior knowledge of the consonant and glide (Cj) produced no significant priming effect. However, in Experiment 3, significant effects were found for the consonant-vowel coupled with a nasal coda (CVN) and the consonant with a diphthong (CVV), compared with the consonant-vowel alone (CV). These results suggest that the implicit priming effects for Japanese are closely related to the CV-C and CV-V structure, called the mora. The authors discuss cross-linguistic differences in the phonological representation involved in phonological encoding, within current theories of word production.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2004

The eye movements of Japanese pure alexic patients during single word and nonword reading.

Two Japanese patients with pure alexia, SH and YH, who showed right homonymous hemianopia following a left occipital lobe lesion, demonstrated letter-by-letter (LBL) reading in pronouncing Japanese kana words and nonwords. In contrast to alphabetic letters, each Japanese kana character has an invariant and identical pronunciation whether it appears in isolation or as a component of any word and nonword string. It is important to investigate the eye movements as well as reading latency and duration in Japanese-speaking LBL readers. Relative to normal controls, these patients demonstrated a more robust string-length effect, which was characterized by larger increases in reading latency and duration as well as in the number of fixations as the string length increased. We propose that in pure alexia, parallel activation of orthographic representations is abnormally delayed but not completely abolished.

Aged↗

PubMed2003

Surface dyslexia in a Japanese patient with semantic dementia: evidence for similarity-based orthography-to-phonology translation.

We studied the reading performance of a Japanese-speaking patient, TI, with bilateral but asymmetrical (left more than right) temporal-lobe atrophy, severe anomia, and poor word comprehension. Most Japanese kanji characters correspond to several different legitimate pronunciations in different contexts, with varying degrees of correspondence consistency. TI made many errors in reading aloud words that violate statistically typical character-sound correspondences, especially for less common words, but had relatively preserved ability to read aloud strings in which the assignment of the typical pronunciation for each component character yields the correct pronunciation for the whole word. The degree of consistency of character-sound correspondences affected his performance on both words and nonwords in a graded manner. One interpretation is that TI's surface dyslexic reading reflects intact direct computation of phonology from orthography, but without the additional constraint from word meaning that is, in this framework, considered critical for correct pronunciation of lower-frequency words with atypical character-sound correspondences. Another interpretation is that TI's performance reflects partially damaged lexical knowledge of whole-word orthography and phonology, coupled with spared sublexcal knowledge of character-sound correspondence rules. Whichever of these interpretations is preferred, this study offers the most detailed information yet available on the characteristics of surface dyslexia in Japanese.

Dementia↗

PubMed2002

[Conditional discrimination using 3-dimensional objects by a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes): tests for derived stimulus relations].

A female chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) was trained on the conditional-discrimination task using 3-dimensional objects under a face-to-face experimental setting. In Experiment 1, the subject was required to pick up the correct comparison object, take it to the sample object, and construct a new paired-object with a specific action. After acquisition of the task, derived stimulus relations (associative symmetry) were tested. The subject showed a significant emergence of symmetry only when the spatial arrangements of stimuli were changed between the baseline and test trials. In Experiment 2, the subject was tested under the condition where the action to constructed paired-object was common to all stimuli. The subject showed significant above-chance performance in the transitivity test, but not in the symmetry tests. The present results are generally consistent with previous studies in chimpanzees that show weak evidence for the emergence of symmetry.

Animals↗