| Budget Amount *help |
¥88,270,000 (Direct Cost: ¥67,900,000、Indirect Cost: ¥20,370,000)
Fiscal Year 2015: ¥15,730,000 (Direct Cost: ¥12,100,000、Indirect Cost: ¥3,630,000)
Fiscal Year 2014: ¥16,120,000 (Direct Cost: ¥12,400,000、Indirect Cost: ¥3,720,000)
Fiscal Year 2013: ¥17,030,000 (Direct Cost: ¥13,100,000、Indirect Cost: ¥3,930,000)
Fiscal Year 2012: ¥17,420,000 (Direct Cost: ¥13,400,000、Indirect Cost: ¥4,020,000)
Fiscal Year 2011: ¥21,970,000 (Direct Cost: ¥16,900,000、Indirect Cost: ¥5,070,000)
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| Outline of Final Research Achievements |
A fundamental question in language development is how infants start to assign meaning to words. We hypothesized that three cognitive skills play a critical role: sound-symbolism; symmetry (bidirectional) inference bias; and inference for other individuals’ intent. We experimentally established that: (1) Preverbal infants map auditory words onto visual input by recruiting a cross-modal perceptual processing system and a nascent semantic network. With fMRI study, we identified the right posterior STS as the key area for processing sound symbolic words. 2) In a cross-species comparison study with comparable procedure, human infants posses the symmetry inference bias but chimpanzees did not. 3) In inferring the reference of a novel word, 24-month-old infants are able to infer the speaker’s confidence, and believed that the object that the more confident speaker mapped the novel word would be the correct reference.
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