Grant amount： \43810000 （ Direct Cost: \33700000 、 Indirect Cost： \10110000 ）

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Grant amount： \163020000 （ Direct Cost: \125400000 、 Indirect Cost： \37620000 ）

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Grant amount： \6110000 （ Direct Cost: \4700000 、 Indirect Cost： \1410000 ）

本研究は探索的な研究として、「ポピュレーションアプローチ（大規模調査）」ではなく、より規模の小さい「ハイリスクアプローチ」に基づき、言語発達遅滞など、子のリスク要因が確認された2歳から3歳の子を持つハイリスク家庭を対象とした介入研究である。言葉の遅れを主訴として相談に訪れた、子のリスク要因がわかっている母子と、貧困、低学歴に加えて、文化的マイノリティであるため必要な支援を受けにくいなど親のリスク要因がわかっている国内の日系外国人家庭を対象とする。
平成31年度は引き続き言語発達遅滞が見られる3歳児とその母親の会話データを収集するとともに、子どもの家庭での言語使用に関する質問紙調査を実施した。また昨年度収集した国内の日系外国人家庭の母子会話データを書き起こし、さらに日本語訳をつけるところまで進めることができた。

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Grant amount： \8190000 （ Direct Cost: \6300000 、 Indirect Cost： \1890000 ）

Based on the results of the study, we were able to propose the following points regarding the evaluation and support of language development of linguistic minority children(Brazilian children living in Japan). They are: (1)Evaluation in two languages, Japanese and their first language(inherited language) and comprehensive evaluation of linguistic environmental factors; (2) Support from early childhood to reduce difficulties in learning and social life after entering school; (3) Parents and caregivers should reduce instructions and directions to children and be close to children's intersts and talking to children in a way that expands the context of conversation; (4) Conduct childcare activities tha form linguistic concepts, such as reading picture books individually and repeatedly to children, and (5) Provide support measures to alleviate the sense of trouble for parents to use Japanese.

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Grant amount： \4160000 （ Direct Cost: \3200000 、 Indirect Cost： \960000 ）

This study investigates the development of theory of mind in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and its related factors. The outcomes are as follows. (1) Children with ASD read significantly less fiction books than typically developing children. Conversely, a significant correlation was observed between the passing number of theory of mind tasks and number of fiction books whose titles were recognized. This result suggests that the development of theory of mind promotes interest in fiction books. (2) Children with ASD pass false-belief tasks until fourth grade with the increase in verbal age. However, language ability is an insufficient factor for passing such tasks. (3) In children with ASD, explicit false-belief task performance increases with vocabulary; however, implicit false-belief task performance, which is measured by eye tracking, evinces no change.

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Grant amount： \15600000 （ Direct Cost: \12000000 、 Indirect Cost： \3600000 ）

Japanese test of pragmatic language was developed to assess preschool and school-age children. The test contains items to evaluate figurative language such as metaphor, irony, and indirect request other than politeness control and the like.
The test was revealed to hit the development of pragmatic language from preschool to lower grades of elementary school and to discriminate children with autism spectrum disorder from typically developing children. The correlation coefficients between the test and Children's Communication Checklist-2 were relatively low while some of them were significant. The test was considered to identify children with ASD from a different angle than CCC-2.

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Grant amount： \16510000 （ Direct Cost: \12700000 、 Indirect Cost： \3810000 ）

The aim of the research project is to investigate how children’s ability to understand the speaker’s intentions and emotions in interpersonal communication develops. We conducted two separate studies to look at how children understand the speaker’s intentions and emotions that are communicated implicitly.
The first study examined how typically developing children and children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) understand vocal emotion. The second study examined how mothers use mental state terms toward their children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

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Grant amount： \3250000 （ Direct Cost: \2500000 、 Indirect Cost： \750000 ）

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of bilingual experiences on the cognitive development of socioeconomically disadvantaged minority children in Japan. We compared the performance of 17 low-socio-economic status (SES) Brazilian 5-year-olds, who were Portuguese-Japanese bilinguals, to 17 age-matched middle-SES Japanese monolinguals on measures of executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM). Despite the bilinguals’ lower SES and verbal ability, there were no mono-bilingual differences in measures of EF. However, the monolingual children outperformed the bilingual children on measures of ToM. The results suggest that bilingualism had protective effects on the Brazilian children’s EF, but such effects did not extend to their ToM development in the face of syntactic delay.

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Grant amount： \4420000 （ Direct Cost: \3400000 、 Indirect Cost： \1020000 ）

In the first study, we investigated the relationship among theory of mind, language and executive function in school-aged children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD). It was found that a significant predictor of passing was verbal age for the ‘Sally-Anne’ type false-belief task, and the planning score for the ‘Smarties’ type task and the second order false-belief task. These findings suggest that theory of mind at a higher level requires executive function. In the second study, we investigated the effect of verbal proposition cues related to the basic principle of false-belief. The ‘seeing leads to knowing’ principle was provided verbally before the belief question. It was found that verbal proposition cues facilitate false-belief reasoning in ASD children with a verbal age of 10 years who can understand the false-belief principle and generalize from it.

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Grant amount： \11180000 （ Direct Cost: \8600000 、 Indirect Cost： \2580000 ）

This study empirically approached the developmental origin of the concept of "We", the first-person plural. To approach the development of production of "we", the authors analyzed data derived from Corpus. To approach responsive aspect, the authors developed a new experimental paradigm that require the participants to portion the reward between 2 agents, after experiences the true/selfish/altruistic utterance that included "we" and other pronouns (I/he(she)=other). TD children robustly showed a tendency to reflect the utterance on sharing, while ASD children did not show such tendency.

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Grant amount： \17420000 （ Direct Cost: \13400000 、 Indirect Cost： \4020000 ）

Patterns of language development are diversifying for children who move across cultures in their infancy or early childhood and grow up in environments where the home and societal language differ. The aim of the present study was to provide preliminary data on the language development of Japanese children in their preschool or early schools years within a multicultural and multilingual environment, as well as their parents’ approach to education and language acquisition. This study specifically targeted Japanese families residing in a district in the United States where there is a variety of educational opportunities in Japanese and English.

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Grant amount： \88270000 （ Direct Cost: \67900000 、 Indirect Cost： \20370000 ）

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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Grant amount： \17810000 （ Direct Cost: \13700000 、 Indirect Cost： \4110000 ）

This study examined anxiety in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We especially focused on the following topics and conducted the studies: (1) Understanding of affective prosody assessed by eye-tracking methodology. (2) Anxiety and behavior of children with ASD and their mothers affected by the great east Japan earthquakes. (3) Eye-gaze patterns associated with social anxiety during conversation. (4) Support for the anxiety of mothers and children with ASD. (5) Considering the perspective of the constitutional rights to improve support and special needs education for people with ASD. Our obtained results from the studies above would provide favorable reference data for the development of effective support for ASD people suffering from anxiety.

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Grant amount： \17290000 （ Direct Cost: \13300000 、 Indirect Cost： \3990000 ）

A particular expression (in terms of vocabulary, grammar, set phrases, intonation and speech tempo) can be sometimes linked to its speaker’s personal makeup: age, gender, occupation, social class, generation, looks and personality. Such expressions are called role language.
The goals of this project were five-fold: (i) to further develop the theory of role language, (ii) to develop comparative studies of role language, (iii) to study role language vocabulary in Japanese historically, (iv) to investigate the history of various types of role language, and (v) to extend role language studies to relevant fields.

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Grant amount： \8840000 （ Direct Cost: \6800000 、 Indirect Cost： \2040000 ）

Characteristics of language and communication development were examined among typically developing children and developmentally disordered children both raised in multicultural multilingual environments by assessing vocabulary comprehension and grammatical comprehension in both Japanese and English. Children's parents were asked to fill out a questionaire to examine children's linguistic environment. There was a tendency that vocabulary comprehension was affected by impartial knowledge and experience due to cultural difference both among typically developing children and developmentally disordered children. As for grammatical comprehension, relatively normal developmental patterns were observed among typically developing children while atypical developmental patterns were recognized among developmentally disordered children.
In addition, it was recognized that family support system takes an important role in order to provide better support for the children.

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Grant amount： \11570000 （ Direct Cost: \8900000 、 Indirect Cost： \2670000 ）

We attempted to construct a theoretical model that can explain the inter-relationship between cognitive processes and particular language use in the context of interpersonal relations including the process of cultural adaptation and conflict resolution. In order to test some of the propositions in the model, a series of empirical studies were conducted, mainly on the basis of experimental methods. We also revealed the role of culture as a basis for cognition and linguistic acts. Symposia and workshops were organize at different conferences to present the findings.

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Grant amount： \28860000 （ Direct Cost: \22200000 、 Indirect Cost： \6660000 ）

The goal of this study is to investigate how and to what extent high-functioning children with autistic spectrum disorder (HFASD) understand the speaker's mental and emotional states on the bass of prosodic cues. We conducted a series of experiments to examine if and how school-aged HFASD children understand (a) the speaker's intentions and beliefs behind verbal sarcasm and (b) the speaker's feelings and degree of confidence about the content of the utterance. Two main findings were obtained. First, when the utterance includes mental or emotional vocabulary, HFASD children prioritize the semantic information over the prosodic information in the utterance in order to infer the speaker's mental and emotional states. Second, when the difference among a variety of tone of voices is salient enough, however, HFASD children are able to utilize the prosodic information to infer the speaker's mental and emotional states behind the utterance.

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Grant amount： \3770000 （ Direct Cost: \2900000 、 Indirect Cost： \870000 ）

幼児期は言語発達が目覚ましい時期である。就学以降の人を対象とした研究では、広汎性発達障害や言語障害がある人とない人では、音や人の声などの刺激によって引き起こされる脳の反応が、異なったパターンを示すことが言われている。
我々は幼児期の段階で、それらの聴覚刺激による子どもの脳の反応を捉えることができれば、子どもの音や声の処理能力や言語能力に関わる発達の指標となりえる可能性があるのではないかと考えた。
平成23年度は、我々は3-5歳の定型発達児を対象とするこれまでの研究をさらにすすめ、被験者数を59人にまで増やし、小児用MEG(脳磁図)を用いて「音声」に対する子どもの聴覚刺激による脳反応を測定し、言語能力との関係を調べた。「ね」という呼びかけや共感を表す日本語音声を聴覚刺激とし、等価電流双極子(equivalent current dipole ; ECD)法で聴覚野の反応のIntensityについて解析を行った。さらに、各子どもの聴覚野の反応とK-ABC (Kaufman assessment battery for children)の下位検査である言語課題『なぞなぞ』の得点と比較した。
その結果、両半球において100-200msの時間幅で明らかなIntensityのピークが得られた。スピアマン順位相関において、子どもの左半球のIntensityと『なぞなぞ』の得点に有意な相関が認められた。この関係は、月齢や、非言語性の認知機能で、コントロールして(重回帰分析)も、有意な結果であった。これは子どもの言語発達と聴覚野の反応は深く関係している可能性を示唆している。この成果は、査読つき国際論文に発表した(Eur J Neurosci.2012)。

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Grant amount： \3030000 （ Direct Cost: \2700000 、 Indirect Cost： \330000 ）

Many educators and clinicians believe that bilingualism has a negative influence on language development of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). However, there have been few studies conducted to examine if and how bilingualism affects the language development of children with ASD. In this preliminary study, we focused on Japanese-English bilingual children: typically developing children (TD) and children with ASD. To explore vocabulary and grammatical abilities of high functioning Japanese-English bilingual children with ASD (BLASD) in both languages and to compare results with those of typically developing Japanese-English bilingual children (BLTD). BLASD demonstrated higher abilities in Japanese receptive vocabulary than BLTD, while BLTD showed higher abilities in English receptive and expressive vocabulary than BLASD. These results indicate the possibility that vocabulary development is influenced more strongly by the language spoken in the community in which children grow up. No difference was found among groups for English receptive grammar. By contrast, for Japanese receptive grammar, BLASD demonstrated a developmental pattern which was different from the pattern demonstrated by BLTD.

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Grant amount： \12220000 （ Direct Cost: \9400000 、 Indirect Cost： \2820000 ）

An interdisciplinary approach based on experimental social psychology, developmental psychology, cultural psychology, and linguistics(pragmatics) has revealed mutual determination between verbal communication and cognitive processes which may underlie major conflicts in interpersonal and intergroup settings. The results of the study indicates that verbal acts as well as cognitive processes both rest on interactants mutual understanding of their common grounds. The results have also provided implications for practical strategies for resolving interpersonal, interegroup, and inter-cultural conflicts.

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Grant amount： \18460000 （ Direct Cost: \14200000 、 Indirect Cost： \4260000 ）

Role language (yakuwarigo) is defined as sets of spoken language features (e.g., vocabulary and grammar) and phonetic characteristics (e.g., intonation and accent patterns) associated with particular character types. Throughout the funding period, this study investigated five research questions : (a) the theoretical basis of role language ; (b) the process of children's acquisition of role language ; (c) descriptions of and the historical origins of role language varieties in Japanese ; (d) cross-linguistic analyses of role language between Japanese and foreign languages ; and (e) the educational applications of role language study. The main findings are as follows : the formation of role language is based on social attributes, and by the age of five, children had already acquired knowledge of role language.

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Grant amount： \3200000 （ Direct Cost: \3200000 ）

某市3公立小学校の全学年児童1,374人のうち、775人について、対人行動チェックリスト(SCDC)日本語版12項目のいずれかにあてはまった169人(21.8%)と、そうでない者のうち約1割にあたる78人について、対人応答性尺度(SRS)日本語版の得点をもとに86人について、CCC-2との関連を検討した。
またPDD児10名を含む4歳1ヶ月から11歳6ヶ月(平均生活年齢6歳4ヶ月)の41名を対象としてCCC-2日本語試作版を実施した。田中・ビネー知能検査V、絵画語彙発達検査(PVT-R)、J.COSS第三版、親への調査などを同時に行った。PDD群とTD群の群間比較ではIQ値、CCC-2指標(正値、負値、GCC、SIDC)で有意差があったが、生活年齢、PVT-R、J.COSS、父母の年齢や教育歴などに有意差はなかった。
通級指導教室に通級する知的障害のない発達障害の小学生約60名の保護者にCCC-2およびPARSを、対象児にPVTおよびJ.COSS(第三版)を実施した。PARSのスコアから広汎性発達障害の可能性が示唆された児童をASD群に、ASDの基準を満たさずPVTおよびJ.COSSのスコアから語彙および文法理解力に顕著な困難があると評価された児童をSLI群に分類した。ASDにもSLIにも該当しない場合、その他の発達障害群とした。CCC-2の語用に関する領域(場面に不適切な話し方、ステレオタイプ化さわた言語、コミュニケーション場面の利用、非言語コミュニケーション)のスコアを群間で比較し、発達障害児における語用の問題について、特にその障害がASDに固有のものかどうかに焦点を当て検討した。ASD小学生50名にCCCを実施しクラスター分析を行って、4クラスターを得た。

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Grant amount： \3381154 （ Direct Cost: \3381154 ）

定型発達児母子20組、広汎性発達障害児母子8組の母子間の対話と、同参加児のナラティブの収録を実施した。母子間対話は自然な遊び場面における親子のやりとりをビデオと音声テープに収録し、非言語的な指標(アイコンタクト、指差し、物品のやりとり、愛着行動、ターンテイキングなど)と言語指標(発語量、指示語、共感終助詞など)の発現頻度についての分析を実施中である。定型発達児では1歳後半から2歳前半に発語量が倍増し、言語を用いたコミュニケーションが活発になる。同時期に指示語の使用頻度が増加し、それに相反するように指差しの頻度が減少していく。2歳台では指差し、ちょうだいなどの態度を用いた要求が減少していき、行為を用いた要求から、言語による要求へと変化していく様子がみられた。共感終助詞の使用は2歳前半から徐々に増加し始め、3歳台で一気に倍増していた。
定型発達児群と広汎性発達障害児との大きな違いは、2歳後半から3歳前半時期にみられ、指差し、アイコンタクト、物を見せる、物を渡す行為で出現し、広汎性発達児の行為頻度は定型発達児に比べて低い。一方、指示語や共感終助詞、注意喚起語(「ほら。」や「見て。」など)の出現頻度には両群で差がないが、全体の発語量や、話しかけへの返答には差があり、広汎性発達障害児の反応量は定型発達児と比べると半分程度であった。更に、広汎性発達障害児に特徴的な現象として、名前を呼ばれた際に無視をする現象がみられた。
ナラティブについては、文字のない絵本(「かえるくんの冒険」)と言語のないDVD(「ピングーのやきもち」)を見ながら、物語の概要を対象児に語ってもらう形式をとった。対象児については同時に田中.ビネー(知能指数)、PVT-R(語彙発達検査)、CCC-2(コミュニケーション発達検査)、JCOSS(構文理解検査)を行った。データについては分析中である。

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Grant amount： \17420000 （ Direct Cost: \13400000 、 Indirect Cost： \4020000 ）

Under this project we have obtained following findings : (1) When hearing utterances, ASD children spend less gaze fixation to the referent object which is being looked at by the speaker. (2) They are sensitive to the change in pitch of speech sound, but not to that in phoneme. (3) Their extraction of prosodic meaning is compromised, but could be complimented by off-line, conscious and slow processing, introducing the meta-linguistic knowledge. (4) They show hypersensitive reactions more often to human-related noises than to machine noises. (5) Interventions by teachers and supporters significantly reduce their hyperacusis.

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Grant amount： \3560000 （ Direct Cost: \3200000 、 Indirect Cost： \360000 ）

The theme of the present research is to try to explore based on relevance theory how metarepresentaition is incorporated into language. Uchida chaired a symposium titled 'On metarepresentation' at the 24th national convention of the English Linguistic Society of Japan. He also read a paper and Matusi contributed to the symposium as one of the speakers. Matusi covered a wide range of metarepresentational phenomena and Uchida introduced a new approach to quotation.
The research results are seen in Uchida (2005, 2007a, 2007b), Yoshimura (2006, 2007a, 2007b), and Matsui (2005a, 2005b, 2006a, 2006b, 2007a, 2007b). Among others, Uchida (2005) applies metarepresentational phenomena to free indirect speech and Uchida (2007a) succeeds in explaining a relationship between deixis and metarepresentation.
Language acquisition is especially discussed in Uchida (2007b) and Matsui (2005a, 2005b). Uchida (2007b) takes Japanese verbs kureru / morau / ageru as linguistic items where metarepresentational processes are linguistically realized. Matsui (2005a, 2005b) discuss datte in the view of theory of mind. Yoshimura (2006) surveys previous studies on metalinguistic negation and proposes her own original ideas, which leads to the present research.
Uchida, et. al. (2008) is a translation of Robyn Carston's Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication, to which Uchida and Matsui contributed. The book is a major publication in relevance theory since Sperber and Wilson's Relevance: Communication and Cognition, and the present translation will be of great help to the students and researchers in Japan who are interested in cognitive pragmatics and/or relevance theory.

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Grant amount： \3500000 （ Direct Cost: \3500000 ）

(1)Our first study examined children's ability to assess the reliability of information encoded in an utterance. Japanese children were given two contradicting statements about the location of a hidden object. Each statement was provided by a different individual, and was linguistically marked with a different degree of certainty/evidentiality. Children were then questioned about the location of the object and asked to tell how they reached their conclusion. The result demonstrated that 6-to 7-year-olds could reliably explain how they came to know the location of the hidden object, by referring to the utterance or the particular linguistic marking of speaker certainty/evidentiality, of the more reliable speaker. 5-year-olds were only capable of answering the source question by referring to the utterance of more reliable speaker. This indicates a developmental transition from perceptual to metalinguistic awareness in understanding of the sources of belief between 5-to 7-years of age. By contrast, 3-to 4-year-olds had great difficulty in explaining why they trusted one speaker over the other, even when their choice was correct.
(2)It has been repeatedly shown that when asked to identify a protagonist's false belief on the basis of his false statement, typical English-speaking 3-year-olds dismiss the statement and fail to attribute to him a false belief. In our second study, we tested 3-year-old Japanese children in a similar task, using false statements accompanied by grammaticalized particles of speaker (un-)certainty, as in everyday Japanese utterances. The Japanese children were directly compared with same-aged German children, whose native language does not have grammaticalized epistemic concepts (like English). Japanese children, who are sensitive to different degrees of speaker certainty as indicated by the grammaticalized particles in a way that German children are not, profited from the explicit statement of the protagonist's false belief when it was marked with the attitude of certainty.

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Grant amount： \10900000 （ Direct Cost: \10900000 ）

Empirical studies employing diverse approaches revealed that social cognition is underpinned not only by intra-individual processes but also by collectively shared processes and representations. We first attempted to build a theoretical framework concerning how stereotype-relevant information and causal explanations are transmitted and constructed into collectively shared knowledge. On the basis of this framework, empirical investigations were conducted concerning dyadic conversations and transmission of information among multiple individuals. Also, a cross-linguistic/cultural comparison between Japanese and Western languages revealed differences and commonalities in representations of attributes of individuals.
Another set of studies examined the perception of intentionality in individuals' and groups' behavior. The results indicated that an act is perceived as intentional to the extent to which the group is viewed as a coherent social entity. It was also found that the judgment of responsibility is related to the intentionality judgment. Furthermore, we explored the structure of essentialist cognition and its cultural sharedness.
The perception of intentionality was also approached though developmental studies. Experiments using the false-belief paradigm revealed that the ability to make inferences on others' intention based on verbal cues is achieved at fairly early ages.
Other studies examined the role of social identity and the perception of transparency in meta-cognition. Finally, a series of cross-cultural studies was conducted concerning the comprehension of others' emotional states.

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Grant amount： \3600000 （ Direct Cost: \3600000 ）

In the study reported here, Japanese-speaking children aged 3 to 6 were confronted with making choices based on conflicting input from speakers who varied in the degree of certainty and the quality of evidence they possessed for their opinions. Certainty and evidentiality are encoded in Japanese both in high-frequency ; closed-class, sentence-final particles and also in low-frequency, mental state verbs. Our results suggest that children are able to make use of information encoded in the sentence-final particles earlier than information encoded in verbs ; and that understanding of speaker certainty precedes understanding of quality of evidence. Furthermore, although the results generally support the position that children's overall understanding of epistemic vocabulary correlates with their understanding of false-belief, understanding of the sentence-final particles tested did not correlate with false-belief understanding.
That particles are understood earlier than verbs are can be accounted for in a number of ways. It has been suggested that linguistic items that appear with high frequency in child-directed speech will receive special cognitive salience in child's mind, and as such, may have significant influence to a child's semantic and cognitive development (Choi & Gopnik 1995; Gopnik, Choi, & Baumberger 1996). In the present study, the analysis of Japanese corpus data confirmed the high frequency of sentence-final particles in the mother's speech, and thus, the result tends to support this hypothesis. However, as our data consists of only one child-mother pair, further data is needed to confirm the exact causal relations.
It is our belief that early understanding of particles provides important information about children's understanding of other's epistemic mental states in general. One of the most intriguing results of our study is that understanding of particles does not correlate with understanding of false-belief. It is now widely assumed that passing false-belief tasks involves explicit representational theory of mind (Perner 1991). However, there is currently little agreement as to whether children can grasp others' mental states prior to that, and if they do, how. It has been reported that children who fail false-belief tasks show procedural, unconscious grasp of other's mental states through eye-gaze, and such understanding has been called ‘implicit' understanding of another's mind (Clements & Perner 1994;Ruffman 2000). We are inclined to believe that Japanese 3-year-olds' understanding of other's knowledge states may similarly be of an implicit kind, though the concept of implicit understanding itself requires further clarification. What the current study has shown, however, is that a consistent, working understanding of knowledge states precedes fully representational understanding of (false) beliefs.

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Grant amount： \3700000 （ Direct Cost: \3700000 ）

Interpretation of anaphoric reference is highly context-dependent, and Japanese zero-pronouns are the clearest examples of that. The present study has two main goals. The first is to compare and assess several leading theories of reference assignment, in order to propose a theory of our own which explains the interpretation mechanism of Japanese zero-pronouns. The second is to verify the theory by applying it to create a workable computer program for pronoun resolution.
The following are is the main achievements of the study:
(1)A theoretical model of reference resolution, based on relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1995) has been proposed. The key mechanisms that are involved in interpretation of Japanese zero-pronouns have been identified, such as the balance between 'contextual effects' and 'processing effort' and interaction between 'implicature' (i.e. expectation of specific contextual effects) and 'explicature' (i.e. linguistic information).
(2)A new experiment designed to test on-line interpretation of anaphoric reference has started. This experimental study will be completed within 2 years from now.
(3)A machine learning of model for reference resolution has been proposed and tested. The model incorporate linguistically motivated contextual clues (centering theory). It was applied to resolve Japanese zero-pronouns and outperformed earlier machine learning models.

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