Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

About: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies is a education organization based out in Tokyo, Japan. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Stress (linguistics) & Syllable. The organization has 189 authors who have published 303 publications receiving 3694 citations.

The genetic prehistory of southern Africa

Abstract: Southern and eastern African populations that speak non-Bantu languages with click consonants are known to harbour some of the most ancient genetic lineages in humans, but their relationships are poorly understood. Here, we report data from 23 populations analysed at over half a million single-nucleotide polymorphisms, using a genome-wide array designed for studying human history. The southern African Khoisan fall into two genetic groups, loosely corresponding to the northwestern and southeastern Kalahari, which we show separated within the last 30,000 years. We find that all individuals derive at least a few percent of their genomes from admixture with non-Khoisan populations that began ∼1,200 years ago. In addition, the East African Hadza and Sandawe derive a fraction of their ancestry from admixture with a population related to the Khoisan, supporting the hypothesis of an ancient link between southern and eastern Africa.

Learner Interaction Management in an Avatar and Chat-Based Virtual World

Abstract: In this paper, I report on the findings of a study that investigated non-native speaker interaction in a three dimensional (3D) virtual world that incorporates avatars and text chat known as Active Worlds. Analysis of the chat transcripts indicated that the 24 intermediate level EFL participants were able to undertake a variety of tasks through target language interaction. Moreover, I found evidence in the corpus that over 3 chat sessions the subjects employed transactional communication strategies (424) and also interactional strategies (382). Further analysis revealed that instances of negotiation of meaning focusing on lexis occurred. However, negotiation was infrequent across the 3 task types administered. Task type appeared to influence the quantity of negotiation, with more negotiation occurring in the decision-making task than in the jigsaw and opinion-exchange tasks. In addition, post-study questionnaires indicated that the avatars enhanced the subjects' sense of telepresence and that the learners...