Search Results (7)

The association between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and gender dysphoria (GD) has attracted a great deal of interest among child and adolescent psychiatrists in Japan. In clinical settings, it is common to hear complaints or concerns related to GD from adolescents with ASD. In the past few years, several review articles have been published on ASD and GD. The Initial Clinical Guidelines for co-occurring ASD and GD in adolescents were published in 2018, suggesting the increasing need of intervention for these conditions worldwide. Although a large amount of evidence has been accumulated regarding the co-occurrence of ASD and GD, all review articles were based solely on case reports and articles published in English. In this article, we performed a bilingual literature review using English- and Japanese-language literature databases. We found 13 case reports in English and 11 case reports in Japanese. The Japanese literature included articles on gender-related symptoms in ASD, but not limited to ASD with comorbid GD. Wattel and her colleagues proposed 15 theories on the link between ASD and GD. We classified the reported cases into one or more of the fifteen theories proposed by Wattel. These theories seemed useful in understanding the co-occurrence of ASD and GD, especially in AMAB cases. Wattel’s 15 theories are categorized into biological, psychological, and social factors, respectively. With regard to the social factors, we discussed Japanese school culture and psychological burden among gender-dysphoric students. Further studies are awaited. Full article

As bilingual families increase, the phenomenon of language mixing among children in mixed-language environments has gradually attracted academic attention. This study aims to explore the impact of language mixing on vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children and whether language distance moderates this impact. We recruited two groups of bilingual children, Chinese–English bilinguals and Chinese–Japanese bilinguals, to learn two first-language new words in a monolingual environment and a mixed-language environment, respectively. The results showed that the participants could successfully recognize the novel words in the code-switching sentences. However, when we compared the performance of the two groups of bilingual children, we found that the gaze time proportion of the Chinese–English bilingual children under the code-switching condition was significantly higher than that of the Chinese–Japanese bilingual children, while there was no significant difference under the monolingual condition. This suggests that language mixing has an inhibitory effect on vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children and that this inhibitory effect is influenced by language distance, that is, the greater the language distance, the stronger the inhibitory effect. This study reveals the negative impact of language mixing on vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children and also implies that there may be some other influencing factors, so more research is needed on different types of bilingual children. Full article

This study aims to examine whether a crosslinguistic influence (CLI) is exerted on the referring expressions of the spoken narratives of Japanese–English bilingual children in different discourse contexts. Thirteen early bilingual (school-age) children separately presented Japanese and English narratives for a wordless picture book and a speechless video clip. Further, seven Japanese and nine English monolingual children participated as controls. The linguistic devices that the children adopted to introduce, reintroduce, and maintain the topic were compared with those of their monolingual controls to detect any CLI. As predicted, CLI for English on Japanese was observed but not vice versa. In Japanese, bilinguals utilize significantly more noun phrases (NPs) compared with their monolingual counterparts. More crucially, this was observed only in the referent reintroduction context, indicating that only discourse contexts that require the integration of much pragmatic information may be vulnerable to English influence. Null forms are barely utilized in English narratives; thus, no influence from Japanese was observed. We present the referential choice patterns in the elicited spoken narratives of bilingual school-age children acquiring an under-researched language pair. By controlling for the discourse context, we demonstrate that CLI is more likely to manifest in the reintroduction context. These findings offer additional evidence for the interface and structural overlap hypothesis, further highlighting the criticality of considering information structure as an influencing condition. Full article

Simultaneous bilingual and bicultural children who are schooled in the dominant societal language can acquire literacy in their home language through home literacy practices and weekend school. Twenty-eight Japanese-English bilingual–bicultural children (ages 9 to 14) attending English weekend schools in Japan were assessed using the standardized Test of Written Language (TOWL, 4th ed.). Their overall age-adjusted writing scores showed that most were on a par with same-age US peers. The parents’ responses to parental questionnaires revealed that the children’s regular attendance and enjoyment of weekend school, coupled with parental home support and access to plenty of appropriate English reading materials, helped to establish their English literacy. Nevertheless, the children attained different writing scores. Although many performed within the Average range, some scored either in the Above Average or higher range or the Below Average or lower range. Further analysis of these three groups of children revealed a strong relationship between reading practices and writing scores. Better writers tend to read frequently in English; they enjoy reading independently and voluntarily. These findings underscore the importance of recreational reading as an accessible and affordable means for developing home language literacy in bilingual and bicultural children in Japan. Full article

Phrase table combination in pivot approaches can be an effective method to deal with low-resource language pairs. The common practice to generate phrase tables in pivot approaches is to use standard symmetrization, i.e., grow-diag-final-and. Although some researchers found that the use of non-standard symmetrization could improve bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) scores, the use of non-standard symmetrization has not been commonly employed in pivot approaches. In this study, we propose a strategy that uses the non-standard symmetrization of word alignment in phrase table combination. The appropriate symmetrization is selected based on the highest BLEU scores in each direct translation of source–target, source–pivot, and pivot–target of Kazakh–English (Kk–En) and Japanese–Indonesian (Ja–Id). Our experiments show that our proposed strategy outperforms the direct translation in Kk–En with absolute improvements of 0.35 (a 11.3% relative improvement) and 0.22 (a 6.4% relative improvement) BLEU points for 3-gram and 5-gram, respectively. The proposed strategy shows an absolute gain of up to 0.11 (a 0.9% relative improvement) BLEU points compared to direct translation for 3-gram in Ja–Id. Our proposed strategy using a small phrase table obtains better BLEU scores than a strategy using a large phrase table. The size of the target monolingual and feature function weight of the language model (LM) could reduce perplexity scores. Full article

Previous research has paid much attention to the overall acquisition of vocabularies among bilingual children in comparison to their monolingual counterparts. Much less attention has been paid to the type of words acquired and the possible transfer or cross-linguistic effects of the other language on vocabulary development. Thus, this study aims to explore similarities and dissimilarities in the vocabularies of simultaneous bilinguals and Japanese monolinguals and considers the possible cross-linguistic similarity effect on word acquisition. Six simultaneous Japanese–English bilingual children (mean age = 34.75 months (2.56)) were language–age-matched with six Japanese monolinguals; their productive vocabularies were compared regarding size and categories. Additionally, characteristic acquired words were compared using correspondence analyses. Results showed that, although delayed due to the reduced inputs, young bilinguals have a similar set of vocabularies in terms of word category as monolinguals. However, bilingual children’s vocabularies reflect their unevenly distributed experience with the language. Fewer interactive experiences with language speakers may result in a lower acquisition of interactive words. Furthermore, there is a cross-linguistic effect on acquisition, likely caused by form similarity between Japanese katakana words and English words. Even between languages with great dissimilarities, resources and cues are sought and used to facilitate bilingual vocabulary acquisition. Full article

Objective: Food insecurity remains a major public health issue in the United States, though lack of research among Asian Americans continue to underreport the issue. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the prevalence and burden of food insecurity among disaggregated Asian American populations. Methods: The California Health Interview Survey, the largest state health survey, was used to assess the prevalence of food insecurity among Asian American subgroups with primary exposure variable of interest being acculturation. Survey-weighted descriptive, bivariate, and multivariable robust Poisson regression analyses, were conducted and alpha less than 0.05 was used to denote significance. Results: The highest prevalence of food insecurity was found among Vietnamese (16.42%) and the lowest prevalence was among Japanese (2.28%). A significant relationship was noted between prevalence of food insecurity and low acculturation for Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese subgroups. Language spoken at home was significant associated with food insecurity. For example, among Chinese, being food insecure was associated with being bilingual (prevalence ratio [PR] = 2.51) or speaking a non-English language at home (PR = 7.24), while among South Asians, it was associated with speaking a non-English language at home was also related to higher prevalence (PR = 3.62), as compared to English speakers only. Likewise, being foreign-born also related to being food insecure among Chinese (PR = 2.31), Filipino (PR = 1.75), South Asian (PR = 3.35), Japanese (PR = 2.11), and Vietnamese (PR = 3.70) subgroups, when compared to their US-born counterparts. Conclusion: There is an imperative need to address food insecurity burden among Asian Americans, especially those who have low acculturation. Full article