Masami Imai
Biographic Data
| ID | 1162926 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Masami Imai |
| GIVEN NAMES | Masami |
| FAMILY NAME | Imai |
| SIGNATURE | IMAI M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Wesleyan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7920-8004 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 29 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Zombie lending, labor hoarding, and local industry growth
From green to turquoise: Exploring age and socioeconomic status in the acquisition of color terms
Previous research demonstrates that children delineate more nuanced color boundaries with increased exposure to their native language. As socioeconomic status (SES) is known to correlate with differences in the amount of language input children receive, this study attempts to extend previous research by asking how both age (age 3 vs 5) and SES (under-resourced vs advantaged) might impact color name acquisition of preschool children. The results c…
Local economic impacts of legislative malapportionment
The contingency symmetry bias (affirming the consequent fallacy) as a prerequisite for word learning: A comparative study of pre-linguistic human infants and chimpanzees
Humans are known to possess an "affirming the consequent fallacy," which assumes that a learned contingency holds true even when the order is reversed. In contrast, non-human animals do not fall for this fallacy, as they do not have the contingency symmetry bias. Importantly, language is founded on the symmetrical relationship between symbols and referents, and the contingency symmetry bias plays a key role in word learning. A critical problem fo…
Sound Symbolism Facilitates Long-Term Retention of the Semantic Representation of Novel Verbs in Three-Year-Olds
Previous research has shown that sound symbolism facilitates action label learning when the test trial used to assess learning immediately followed the training trial in which the (novel) verb was taught. The current study investigated whether sound symbolism benefits verb learning in the long term. Forty-nine children were taught either sound-symbolically matching or mismatching pairs made up of a novel verb and an action video. The following da…
The Effects of Ethnic Chinese Minority on Vietnam’s Regional Economic Development in the Post-Vietnam War Period
This paper examines the impact of the Hoa, an ethnically Chinese, economically dominant minority, on regional economic development in Vietnam. To address the endogeneity of the geographical distribution of the Hoa, we use an important historical episode: the rapid deterioration in Sino-Vietnamese diplomatic relationship that led many ethnic Chinese to flee abroad, particularly to the refugee camps in the Guangxi province of China, in 1979. We fin…
The role of timing and prototypical causality on how preschoolers fast-map novel verb meanings
In controlled contexts, young children find it more difficult to learn novel words for actions than words for objects: Imai et al. found that English-speaking three-year-olds mistakenly choose a novel object as a referent for a novel verb about 42% of the time despite hearing the verb in a transitive sentence. The current two studies investigated whether English three- and five-year-old children would find resultative actions easier (since they a…
Taking the lord's name in vain: The impact of connected directors on 19th century British banks
The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution
Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary relationship between speech sounds and meaning. We review evidence that, contrary to the traditional view in linguistics, sound symbolism is an important design feature of language, which affects online processing of language, and most importantly, language acquisition. We propose the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis , claiming that (i) pre-verbal infants are sensitive to sound symbolism, due to a biolog…
Economic shocks and civil conflict: Evidence from foreign interest rate movements
Contingent capital and bank risk-taking among British banks before the First World War1
The recent financial turmoil highlights the incentive of highly leveraged financial institutions to take excessive risk, given the protection of limited liability. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, many banks operated under liability rules which obligated shareholders to bear larger costs of bank insolvency in the form of contingent, or even unlimited, liability. This article examines the empirical relationship between the size o…
Ideologies, vested interest groups, and postal saving privatization in Japan
Japan’s return to gold: Turning points in the value of the yen during the 1920s
Sound symbolism facilitates early verb learning
The evolution of a national banking market in pre-war Japan
As time goes by: Evidence for two systems in processing space → time metaphors
Temporal language is often couched in spatial metaphors. English has been claimed to have two space → time metaphoric systems: the ego-moving metaphor, wherein the observer's context progresses along the time-line towards the future, and the time-moving metaphor, wherein time is conceived of as a river or conveyor belt on which events are moving from the future to the past. In three experiments, we investigated the psychological status of these m…
Transitivity and the Incorporation of Ground Information in Japanese Path Verbs
Muehleisen, V. & Imai, M. (' 1 9R . Transitivity and the incorporation of Ground information in Japanese path verbs. In K. Lee, E. Sweetwer, & M. Verspoor (Eds.) Lexical and syntactic constructions and the con-struction of meaning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Controlling the application of the mutual exclusivity assumption in the acquisition of lexical hierarchies
The mutual exclusivity assumption is a very useful constraint for learning basic‐level category terms: children can map a novel word on to an object whose label has not yet been learned. It can also help children exclude a newly labeled object from the extension of an originally overextended old category and establish a new category. However, to learn words other than basic‐level category terms, for example subordinate and superordinate category …
Constraint on word‐learning constraints
Many researchers have agreed that word learning in young children is guided by so‐called “word‐learning principles.” However, these principles may make it difficult to learn a substantial part of the lexicon unless they are appropriately controlled. To learn proper names, the taxonomic assumption and/or the shape bias must be overridden; to learn names for substances, withdrawal of the whole‐object assumption and/or the shape bias is required; an…
Heuristics in learning classifiers: The acquisition of the classifier system and its implications for the nature of lexical acquisition
Classifiers are like nouns in that they classify entities in the world into lexical categories. However, the lexical nature of the classifier system is very different from that of nouns. We discuss how Japanese and Chinese children learn the meanings of classifiers. We focus on two specific questions: How classifier acquisition is different from noun acquisition; and what the prerequisites are for spontaneously extracting the meanings of classifi…
A cross-linguistic study of early word meaning: Universal ontology and linguistic influence
Taking the lord's name in vain: The impact of connected directors on 19th century British banks
Contingent capital and bank risk-taking among British banks before the First World War1
The recent financial turmoil highlights the incentive of highly leveraged financial institutions to take excessive risk, given the protection of limited liability. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, many banks operated under liability rules which obligated shareholders to bear larger costs of bank insolvency in the form of contingent, or even unlimited, liability. This article examines the empirical relationship between the size o…
Economic shocks and civil conflict: Evidence from foreign interest rate movements
Ideologies, vested interest groups, and postal saving privatization in Japan
The evolution of a national banking market in pre-war Japan
Local economic impacts of legislative malapportionment
Japan’s return to gold: Turning points in the value of the yen during the 1920s
A cross-linguistic study of early word meaning: Universal ontology and linguistic influence
Transitivity and the Incorporation of Ground Information in Japanese Path Verbs
Muehleisen, V. & Imai, M. (' 1 9R . Transitivity and the incorporation of Ground information in Japanese path verbs. In K. Lee, E. Sweetwer, & M. Verspoor (Eds.) Lexical and syntactic constructions and the con-struction of meaning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Controlling the application of the mutual exclusivity assumption in the acquisition of lexical hierarchies
The mutual exclusivity assumption is a very useful constraint for learning basic‐level category terms: children can map a novel word on to an object whose label has not yet been learned. It can also help children exclude a newly labeled object from the extension of an originally overextended old category and establish a new category. However, to learn words other than basic‐level category terms, for example subordinate and superordinate category …
Constraint on word‐learning constraints
Many researchers have agreed that word learning in young children is guided by so‐called “word‐learning principles.” However, these principles may make it difficult to learn a substantial part of the lexicon unless they are appropriately controlled. To learn proper names, the taxonomic assumption and/or the shape bias must be overridden; to learn names for substances, withdrawal of the whole‐object assumption and/or the shape bias is required; an…
Heuristics in learning classifiers: The acquisition of the classifier system and its implications for the nature of lexical acquisition
Classifiers are like nouns in that they classify entities in the world into lexical categories. However, the lexical nature of the classifier system is very different from that of nouns. We discuss how Japanese and Chinese children learn the meanings of classifiers. We focus on two specific questions: How classifier acquisition is different from noun acquisition; and what the prerequisites are for spontaneously extracting the meanings of classifi…
As time goes by: Evidence for two systems in processing space → time metaphors
Temporal language is often couched in spatial metaphors. English has been claimed to have two space → time metaphoric systems: the ego-moving metaphor, wherein the observer's context progresses along the time-line towards the future, and the time-moving metaphor, wherein time is conceived of as a river or conveyor belt on which events are moving from the future to the past. In three experiments, we investigated the psychological status of these m…
Sound symbolism facilitates early verb learning
The evolution of a national banking market in pre-war Japan
Ideologies, vested interest groups, and postal saving privatization in Japan
Japan’s return to gold: Turning points in the value of the yen during the 1920s
Economic shocks and civil conflict: Evidence from foreign interest rate movements
Contingent capital and bank risk-taking among British banks before the First World War1
The recent financial turmoil highlights the incentive of highly leveraged financial institutions to take excessive risk, given the protection of limited liability. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, many banks operated under liability rules which obligated shareholders to bear larger costs of bank insolvency in the form of contingent, or even unlimited, liability. This article examines the empirical relationship between the size o…
The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution
Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary relationship between speech sounds and meaning. We review evidence that, contrary to the traditional view in linguistics, sound symbolism is an important design feature of language, which affects online processing of language, and most importantly, language acquisition. We propose the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis , claiming that (i) pre-verbal infants are sensitive to sound symbolism, due to a biolog…
Taking the lord's name in vain: The impact of connected directors on 19th century British banks
The role of timing and prototypical causality on how preschoolers fast-map novel verb meanings
In controlled contexts, young children find it more difficult to learn novel words for actions than words for objects: Imai et al. found that English-speaking three-year-olds mistakenly choose a novel object as a referent for a novel verb about 42% of the time despite hearing the verb in a transitive sentence. The current two studies investigated whether English three- and five-year-old children would find resultative actions easier (since they a…
The Effects of Ethnic Chinese Minority on Vietnam’s Regional Economic Development in the Post-Vietnam War Period
This paper examines the impact of the Hoa, an ethnically Chinese, economically dominant minority, on regional economic development in Vietnam. To address the endogeneity of the geographical distribution of the Hoa, we use an important historical episode: the rapid deterioration in Sino-Vietnamese diplomatic relationship that led many ethnic Chinese to flee abroad, particularly to the refugee camps in the Guangxi province of China, in 1979. We fin…
Sound Symbolism Facilitates Long-Term Retention of the Semantic Representation of Novel Verbs in Three-Year-Olds
Previous research has shown that sound symbolism facilitates action label learning when the test trial used to assess learning immediately followed the training trial in which the (novel) verb was taught. The current study investigated whether sound symbolism benefits verb learning in the long term. Forty-nine children were taught either sound-symbolically matching or mismatching pairs made up of a novel verb and an action video. The following da…
The contingency symmetry bias (affirming the consequent fallacy) as a prerequisite for word learning: A comparative study of pre-linguistic human infants and chimpanzees
Humans are known to possess an "affirming the consequent fallacy," which assumes that a learned contingency holds true even when the order is reversed. In contrast, non-human animals do not fall for this fallacy, as they do not have the contingency symmetry bias. Importantly, language is founded on the symmetrical relationship between symbols and referents, and the contingency symmetry bias plays a key role in word learning. A critical problem fo…
Local economic impacts of legislative malapportionment
From green to turquoise: Exploring age and socioeconomic status in the acquisition of color terms
Previous research demonstrates that children delineate more nuanced color boundaries with increased exposure to their native language. As socioeconomic status (SES) is known to correlate with differences in the amount of language input children receive, this study attempts to extend previous research by asking how both age (age 3 vs 5) and SES (under-resourced vs advantaged) might impact color name acquisition of preschool children. The results c…
Zombie lending, labor hoarding, and local industry growth
Computer Science (11 works) · Linguistics (10 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Economics (9 works) · Artificial Intelligence (7 works) · Artificial Intelligence (7 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (6 works) · Language Development and Disorders (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Cognitive psychology (5 works)