Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)   Publisher：ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC  

The current investigation examined the development of verbal display rule knowledge among three age groups (elementary school children, adolescents, and adults) from the U.S. and Japan (N = 183). Participants predicted verbal display rule behavior (i.e. regulating the verbal expression of emotion in alignment with social norms) and motives in response to two scenarios: a) a conflicting opinions scenario in which two peers hold conflicting opinions, and b) a welfare scenario in which expressing a true opinion is likely to cause emotional harm. Cultural differences in response to the conflicting opinions scenario emerged gradually over development, with Japanese adults endorsing greater emotion regulation than American adults; children and adolescents in both countries, however, endorsed similar degrees of emotion expression. In response to the welfare scenario, Japanese and Americans both endorsed the use of masking display rules to protect the welfare of others, with display rule endorsement increasing with age for both groups. Results contribute to a greater understanding of how display rule knowledge changes over the course of development in a manner that is both culturally variable and context-specific.

DOI： 10.1016/j.cogdev.2019.100801

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)   Publisher：BRILL ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS  

Developmental research suggests that young children tend to value dominant individuals over subordinates. This research, however, has nearly exclusively been carried out in Western cultures, and cross-cultural research among adults has revealed cultural differences in the valuing of dominance. In particular, it seems that Japanese culture, relative to many Western cultures, values dominance less. We conducted two experiments to test whether this difference would be observed in preschoolers. In Experiment 1, preschoolers in France and in Japan were asked to identify with either a dominant or a subordinate. French preschoolers identified with the dominant, but Japanese preschoolers were at chance. Experiment 2 revealed that Japanese preschoolers were more likely to believe a subordinate than a dominant individual, both compared to chance and compared to previous findings among French preschoolers. The convergent results from both experiments thus reveal an early emerging cross-cultural difference in the valuing of dominance.

DOI： 10.1163/15685373-12340058

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)   Publisher：ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD  

Observational and experimental data have revealed that preschoolers possess some argumentation skills, both in the production and the evaluation of arguments. However, these skills might have been fostered by the particular cultural context of Western middle- and upper-classes families, to which most children studied belong. Some data suggests that children in other cultures possess at least some of these skills, but no experimental data had been gathered in Eastern cultures. These cultures are supposed to frown on argumentation, and might thus be less conducive to the early development of argumentation skills. We test the emergence of argument evaluation skills in Japanese 5-year-olds by presenting them with a choice between endorsing a strong, perceptual argument, and a weak, circular argument. A first experiment revealed a trend in the direction of the strong argument. A second experiment that addresses some methodological concerns of the first demonstrates a significant tendency to follow the strong argument. These results are similar to those previously gathered in two other cultures (Swiss and Maya), and suggest that some basic argumentation skills are early developing across cultures.

DOI： 10.1080/17405629.2017.1308250

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)   Publisher：ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD  

A dominant theory of humor comprehension suggests that people understand humor by first perceiving some incongruity in an expression and then resolving it. This is called "the incongruity-resolution theory." Experimental studies have investigated the neural basis of humor comprehension, and multiple neural substrates have been proposed; however, the specific substrate for incongruity resolution is still unknown. The reason may be that the resolution phase, despite its importance in humor comprehension, has not been successfully distinguished from the perception phase because both phases occur almost simultaneously. To reveal the substrate, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance study using 51 healthy participants. We used a humor-producing frame of "Given A, I'd say B, because C" so as to focus on the resolution phase independently by suspending humor processing just after the perception phase. This frame allowed us to separate the two phases. Based on our results, incongruity resolution evoked positive emotion and activated the left amygdala, which is known to be related to positive emotion. On the basis of these findings, we argue that the amygdala plays an important role in humor comprehension, considering its functional role in emotional evaluation, particularly the relevance detection for incoming stimuli.

DOI： 10.1080/17470919.2017.1365760

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Language：English   Publisher：ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD  

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)   Publisher：PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD  

A hearer's perception of an utterance as sarcastic depends on integration of the heard statement, the discourse context, and the prosody of the utterance, as well as evaluation of the incongruity among these aspects. The effect of prosody in sarcasm comprehension is evident in everyday conversation, but little is known about its underlying mechanism or neural substrates. To elucidate the neural underpinnings of sarcasm comprehension in the auditory modality, we conducted a functional MRI experiment with 21 adult participants. The participants were provided with a short vignette in which a child had done either a good or bad deed, about which a parent made a positive comment. The participants were required to judge the degree of the sarcasm in the parent's positive comment (praise), which was accompanied by either positive or negative affective prosody. The behavioral data revealed that an incongruent combination of utterance and the context (i.e., the parent's positive comment on a bad deed by the child) induced perception of sarcasm. There was a significant interaction between context and prosody: sarcasm perception was enhanced when positive prosody was used in the context of a bad deed or, vice versa, when negative prosody was used in the context of a good deed. The corresponding interaction effect was observed in the rostro-ventral portion of the left inferior frontal gyrus corresponding to Brodmann's Area (BA) 47. Negative prosody incongruent with a positive utterance (praise) activated the bilateral insula extending to the right inferior frontal gyrus, anterior cingulate cortex, and brainstem. Our findings provide evidence that the left inferior frontal gyrus, particularly BA 47, is involved in integration of discourse context and utterance with affective prosody in the comprehension of sarcasm. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

DOI： 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2016.04.031

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)   Publisher：ELSEVIER  

In everyday conversation, both children and adults have an expectation that the speaker is telling the truth. In reality, however, this expectation is not always fulfilled, and both children and adults are equipped with a capacity for epistemic vigilance, i.e. a capacity to assess the speaker's trustworthiness in order to avoid being misinformed. The hearer's assessment of the speaker's trustworthiness is based on two criteria: his ability to provide true information and his benevolence toward the hearer. In two studies, we investigated how young children use these criteria, by focusing on two indicators of trustworthiness: linguistic expressions of speaker certainty, and personal familiarity. In the first study, both 3- and 4-year-olds were successful in distinguishing the degree of speaker certainty expressed by linguistic indicators and using it to assess the trustworthiness of the speaker. In the second study, children's ability to assess the speaker's trustworthiness on the basis of his attitude of certainty was further scrutinized. When pitted against personal familiarity, children's bias toward the certain speaker was modified in 5-year-olds but not 3 year-olds. The difference between the two age groups suggests that epistemic vigilance consists of a set of distinct components, with different developmental timelines. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

DOI： 10.1016/j.lingua.2015.10.007

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Language：English   Publisher：ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV  

DOI： 10.1016/j.pragma.2013.11.010

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)   Publisher：ELSEVIER  

The ability of infants and toddlers to imitate words they hear promotes early word learning. Their imitation of words gradually grows into proper quotation of words and utterances, in which the original source of the utterance is formally acknowledged. Little is known, however, about the development of children's ability to quote a variety of linguistic inputs. On the basis of previous findings in theory-of-mind research and cognitive pragmatics, we adopted the following working hypotheses: children will (a) quote onomatopoeia and words earlier and more frequently than utterances; (b) first quote utterances concerning desires and emotions and later quote utterances expressing thoughts; and (c) base early quotations on resemblance in form rather than resemblance in meaning. These hypotheses were tested in a study of Japanese quotative particles in recorded conversations between a mother and her child. The data are intensive and longitudinal, and detailed analyses of their conversational content generally support the hypotheses, with one important difference. Contrary to our first hypothesis, the child quoted utterances as often as onomatopoeia and words, the majority of which were imagined utterances attributed to the child's non-human companions. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

DOI： 10.1016/j.pragma.2013.06.008

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)   Publisher：CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS  

Recently, a series of studies demonstrated false belief understanding in young children through completely nonverbal measures. These studies have revealed that children younger than 3 years of age, who consistently fail the standard verbal false belief test, can anticipate others' actions based on their attributed false beliefs. The current study examined whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), who are known to have difficulties in the verbal false belief test, may also show such action anticipation in a nonverbal false belief test. We presented video stimuli of an actor watching an object being hidden in a box. The object was then displaced while the actor was looking away. We recorded children's eye movements and coded whether they spontaneously anticipated the actor's subsequent behavior, which could only have been predicted if they had attributed a false belief to her. Although typically developing children correctly anticipated the action, children with ASD failed to show such action anticipation. The results suggest that children with ASD have an impairment in false belief attribution, which is independent of their verbal ability.

DOI： 10.1017/S0954579410000106

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)   Publisher：WILEY-BLACKWELL  

It has been repeatedly shown that when asked to identify a protagonist's false belief on the basis of his false statement, English-speaking 3-year-olds dismiss the statement and fail to attribute to him a false belief. In the present studies, 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. Japanese children profited from the explicit statement of the protagonist's false belief when it was marked with the attitude of certainty in a way that German children did not - presumably because Japanese but not German children must process such marking routinely in their daily discourse. These results are discussed in the broader context of linguistic and theory of mind development.

DOI： 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00812.x

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)   Publisher：WILEY PERIODICALS  

In verbal communication, the hearer takes advantage of the linguistic expressions of certainty and evidentiality to assess how committed the speaker might be to the truth of the informational content of the utterance. Little is known, however, about the precise developmental mechanism of this ability. In this chapter, we approach the question by elucidating factors that are likely to constrain young children's understanding of linguistically encoded certainty and evidentiality, including the types of linguistic form of these expressions, namely, grammaticalized or lexical forms. (C) Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

DOI： 10.1002/cd.250

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)   Publisher：WILEY PERIODICALS  

Evidentials are grammatical elements such as affixes and particles indicating the source of knowledge. We provide an overview of this grammatical category and consider three research domains to which developmental studies on evidentiality contribute: the acquisition of linguistic means to characterize knowledge, the conceptual understanding of knowledge sources, and the evaluation of others' testimony. We also consider the study of evidentiality in relation to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis about the influence of language on thought. (C) Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

DOI： 10.1002/cd.246

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