Research groups such as Professor Kaoru Sekiyama of Kumamoto University, Assistant Professor Atsushi Shinozaki of Sapporo Medical University, and Institute of International Telecommunications Basic Technology have found that when listening to people face-to-face, Japanese and English natives have a brain network. The research result that the way of activity is different was published in the British open access journal "Scientific Reports".It is attracting attention as a unique study that shows the characteristics of Japanese people in the process of integrating visual information in conversation with auditory information.
It is known that when listening to a person's story facing each other, the way they hear is influenced by the visual information of "movement of the mouth", and audiovisual integration (combining visual and auditory information in the brain) occurs. However, research by Professor Sekiyama et al. Has shown that people whose mother tongue is Japanese are not as affected by visual information as those whose mother tongue is English.
This time, the research group measured the brain activity of about 20 native Japanese speakers and XNUMX native English speakers using functional MRI (fMRI).As a result of analyzing the brain activity pattern on the obtained data, the functional connection between the primary auditory cortex and the part called "MT field" that processes visual motor information in English native speakers is higher than that in Japanese native speakers. Turned out to be strong.
In other words, the difference is that English native speakers have a close coordination between the intracerebral processing of sounds heard from the ears and the intracerebral processing of visible mouth movements, whereas this coordination is weak in Japanese native speakers. The result is that the difference in audiovisual integration in speech perception between native Japanese and native English speakers, which has been known so far, is supported from the aspect of activation pattern of the brain network.
There has been a hypothesis that it is effective to use not only video (voice) but also the visual information of the speaker in foreign language learning, but that theory did not apply to native Japanese speakers.It is considered that the background of this is the difference in the characteristics of information processing between Japanese and Westerners as seen in the results of this research.
