The fundamental frequencies (F0) of daily life utterances of Japanese infants and their parents from the infant's birth until about 5 years of age were longitudinally analyzed. The analysis revealed that an infant's F0 mean decreases as a function of month of age. It also showed that within- and between-utterance variability in infant F0 is different before and after the onset of two-word utterances, probably reflecting the difference between linguistic and nonlinguistic utterances. Parents' F0 mean is high in infant-directed speech (IDS) before the onset of two-word utterances, but it gradually decreases and reaches almost the same value as in adult-directed speech after the onset of two-word utterances. The between-utterance variability of parents' F0 in IDS is large before the onset of two-word utterances and it subsequently becomes smaller. It is suggested that these changes of parents' F0 are closely related to the feasibility of communication between infants and parents.
A follow-up study was conducted on AS, previously reported as an English-Japanese bilingual with monolingual phonological dyslexia in English (Wydell and Butterworth, 1999). It was hypothesised that AS's fundamental deficit which lead to his dyslexia in English would still persist despite him successfully taking a BSc course in an English-speaking country. AS and his Japanese and English control participants were asked to read aloud a target stimulus first, and then to decide whether the target was a word or nonword. Unlike the control participants, AS showed a marked dissociation between his performance in the lexical (orthographic and phonological) decision and the word naming tasks. Often those words and pseudo-homophones (e.g. neym), which AS read erroneously, were correct in the decision tasks -the target pseudo-homophone or word was substituted by another orthographically similar word. The results thus demonstrated that his reading of unfamiliar words or nonwords is essentially based on orthographic approximation using the visual similarities between words. The results confirmed the earlier finding that AS has a core phonological deficit which led to his dyslexia but never affected his reading in Japanese. The results also confirmed that this deficit persists when reading in English. This implies that whatever the neurological abnormality that AS may have, this only affects certain languages, and this abnormality persists with time.AS was first reported by Wydell and Butterworth (1999) as an English-Japanese bilingual with monolingual phonological dyslexia in English. His ability to read Japanese was equivalent to at least that of a Japanese undergraduate, while he was severely dyslexic in English. This is particularly interesting since the Japanese writing system uses two qualitatively different scripts -Kanji and Kana. Kanji is a logographic and morphographic script, and was originally imported from China. Because most of Kanji
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