慶應義塾大学人文グローバルCOE講演会

ジェスチャー研究、言語発達研究で有名なバーミングハム大学の喜多壮太郎さんと、新進気鋭の神経心理学者で、精力的に乳児の言語の脳研究をしているウエールズ大学の Guillaume Thierryさんhttp://www.psychology.bangor.ac.uk/research/staff_profile.php?person=guillaume_thierryが来日されますので、お二人をお招きしてワークショップを開催します。奮ってご参加ください。

問い合わせ先：慶應義塾大学 今井むつみ(imai@sfc.keio.ac.jp)

Workshop on Language and cognitive processes: neurophysiological, developmental, and crosslinguistic perspectives

Speakers:

Guillaume Thierry
 (University of Wales, School of Psychology)
Unconsicous lexical semantic access in bilinguals

Sotaro Kita
 (University of Birmingham, School of Psychology)
Spontaneous speech-accompanying gesture as a window into "thinking-for-speaking": Insights from cross-linguistic and developmental studies

日時：２月２６日 １６時から１８時３０分まで

場所：慶応大学三田キャンパス東館4階セミナー室

講演概要

Guillaume Thierry
Unconsicous lexical semantic access in bilinguals

Whether or not the native language of bilingual individuals is active during second language comprehension and production is the subject of lively debate. Studies of bilingualism have often used a mix of first and second language words, thereby creating an artificial "dual-language" context. I will present a series of experiments which target implicit access to the first language when bilinguals read, listen to, or retrieve words exclusively in their second language. In two experiments, Chinese-English bilinguals were required to decide whether English words presented in pairs are related in meaning or not; they were unaware of the fact that half of the words concealed a phonological and/or orthographic repetition when translated into Chinese. The hidden factor generally failed to affect behavioural performance, but it significantly modulated the N400 wave of brain potentials showing that English words are automatically and unconsciously translated into Chinese. Furthermore, it is the phonological form of the Chinese equivalent which is activated, not its orthographic form. A third experiment tested repetition priming in Chinese character in the context of a production task. Chinese-English bilinguals were asked to judge whether or not the English names of two visually presented objects rhymed. In this context again, significant repetition priming indexed by the N400 ERP component indicated that the Chinese translation equivalents of the words had been activated. These findings demonstrate that native language activation is an unconscious correlate of second language comprehension and production.

Sotaro Kita:
Spontaneous speech-accompanying gesture as a window into "thinking-for-speaking": Insights from cross-linguistic and developmental studies

This talk concerns gestures that spontaneously accompany speech. In a series of three studies, involving adult and child speakers of Japanese, Turkish, and English, we examined gestures that iconically depicted events in which a protagonist moved in a certain manner to a certain direction.

It was found that gestural representations of manner and directionality of motion were influenced by how those two pieces of information were linguistically encoded in the concurrent speech. Furthermore, this linguistic effect on gestures differed between adults and children. From these results, we concluded that gestures are generated from analogue (imagistic) representations of events that interface spatial thinking and speaking, and that the linguistic units relevant for the interfacing differ between adults and children.