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We report a fragment-completion questionnaire and a self-paced reading experiment investigating relative clauses in Japanese that contain two extraction sites in the same clause. The results indicate that in such double-gap relative clauses there is a preference to fill the object position before the subject position. Previous factors, especially those related to working memory resources, which have often been implicated in extraction preferences, do not predict the patterns observed. The results support the proposal that the accessibility of extraction sites in relative clauses is inversely correlated to the order in which semantic roles are preferentially assigned. We discuss ways of incorporating such a constraint in previous proposals such as expectation-based models. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines Bacarobo, a Japanese comedy contest for robots that are designed to perform and entertain the audience with laughter. In the theatre of Bacarobo, robots can be comedians because the theatrical space and dynamics of Bacarobo attribute a performance capacity to its robots that makes them much more than just objects in themselves. The robot competition unites strategies typical of the Japanese variety show context with effects creating a temporary, consensual reality to present robots as integral players in humorous situations. In this inclusive mise-en-scène, Bacarobo combines the concept of robot as a magical object with the transformative power of the clown to draw upon the Japanese idea of the robot's role in forging a technologically advanced future. The result is that the uncertain and indeterminate aspects of the robotic machines - machines otherwise without practical use and, therefore, important social referents - are turned into something acceptable and even endearing in the name of comedy. The Japanese robot comedy show provides useful material to consider recent thinking within theatre and performance studies on the subject-object relation and on the activation of theatrical space, audience and objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have confirmed a brain dysfunction in people with developmental dyslexia (DD) in certain brain regions, including the left superior temporal gyrus and the left fusiform gyrus. However, the neurobiological substrates in Japanese-speaking people with dyslexia are not fully understood, mostly due to the uniqueness of the orthographic systems. Since a substantial part of the written Japanese includes the logographic Kanji as well as the phonographic Kana systems, the reading disability might be caused not only by a dysfunction in the phonological system, but also by a dysfunction in the visual recognition system. Previous studies reported altered hierarchical visual word form processing in the left occipitotemporal cortex; however, it remains unclear whether the altered hierarchical visual processing is language stimuli-specific. Therefore, we aimed to investigate whether (a) Japanese-speaking individuals with DD exhibit atypical hierarchical visual processing, and if so, (b) whether the altered hierarchical visual processing is language stimuli-specific or not. The present study investigated the brain activation pattern for the hierarchical component of the Kanji characters and object stimuli in typically developing (TD) adolescents and adolescents with DD using functional magnetic resonance imaging. For the Kanji characters, adolescents with DD showed a greater activation in the left occipital gyrus and right occipital fusiform gyrus, and this hyperactivity was also found for pseudo and artificial Kanji characters. These results imply reliance on an early visual system in Kanji reading in Japanese-speaking adolescents with DD. Additionally, we also investigated the brain activity for object stimuli, and adolescents with DD showed a greater activation in the bilateral occipital gyri compared with the TD adolescents. These results imply an altered hierarchical visual processing characterized by overactivation in the early visual areas, which is a not restricted to language stimulus only., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest None., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)