We investigated the effects of everyday language exposure on the prediction of orthographic and phonological forms of a highly predictable word during listening comprehension. Native Japanese speakers in Tokyo (Experiment 1) and Berlin (Experiment 2) listened to sentences that contained a predictable word and viewed four objects. The critical object represented the target word (e.g., /sakana/;fish), an orthographic competitor (e.g., /tuno/;horn), a phonological competitor (e.g., /sakura/;cherry blossom), or an unrelated word (e.g., /hon/;book). The three other objects were distractors. The Tokyo (...) group fixated the target and the orthographic competitor over the unrelated objects before the target word was mentioned, suggesting that they pre-activated the orthographic form of the target word. The Berlin group showed a weaker bias toward the target than the Tokyo group, and they showed a tendency to fixate the orthographic competitor only when the orthographic similarity was very high. Thus, prediction effects were weaker in the Berlin group than in the Tokyo group. We found no evidence for the prediction of phonological information. The obtained group differences support probabilistic models of prediction, which regard the built-up language experience as a basis of prediction. (shrink)

The limits of Taylorism are alive and well in today's manufacturing systems. Automation does have to constrain human ability creativity, judgement and skill, and undermine human dignity. The paper presents an interactive concept of manufacturing. “Human-Oriented Manufacturing Systems” (HOMS), which aims to achieve high flexibility and quality of production while creating an environment for happy working and joyful living.

A key issue in social intelligence design is the realization of artifacts that can fluently communicate with people. Thus, we proposed a two-layered approach to enhance a robot’s capacity of involvement and engagement. The upper layer flexibly controls social interaction by dynamic Bayesian networks (DBN) representing social interaction patterns. The lower layer improves the robustness of the system by detecting rhythmic and repetitive gestures. We designed a listener robot that can follow and record humans’ explanation on how to assemble and/or (...) disassemble a bicycle. The implementation of this system is described by assembling the key algorithms presented in this paper. (shrink)

In this paper, we show that Ogasawa’s theorem has a proof in Bishop style constructive mathematics . In 25, we introduced the elementary constructive theory of C*-algebras in BISH, but we did not discuss the powers of positive elements there. © 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.