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Saji Lab
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A lab that uses experiments to examine how people come to acquire the meanings of words.
AboutAbout the lab
Exploring the embodied and social foundations of word meaning
The Saji Lab studies how people come to acquire the meanings of words. The graduate research program is named "Developmental Science of Meaning Generation."
The lab holds that word meaning arises in the gap between two things: perception, which makes sense of the world in front of us through the body, and culture, the ways of making meaning that members of a society have built up over a long time.
The lab addresses how children and adults acquire linguistic meaning, and how this affects the development of thought and communication.
It examines these questions experimentally from several angles: embodiment, social cognitive abilities, the nature of language as a system of signs, features of individual languages, and features of culture.
Key terms
- Language acquisition
- The process by which children and learners come to master the sounds, meanings, and uses of a language
- Semiotic communication
- Conveying intentions to one another by using signs that stand for something else, such as words and gestures
- Semantics
- The field that studies what meanings words have and how they combine to create meaning
NewsLab news
Associate Professor Saji contributed chapters to "Gengogaku o Kagaku Tetsugaku suru" (Philosophy of Science Applied to Linguistics), published by Taishukan Shoten
Associate Professor Saji contributed chapters to "Symbol Emergence Systems," published by Springer
Associate Professor Saji was among the authors of "Can Artificial Intelligence Explain Language Ability?" (Gengo Noryoku wa Jinko Chino de Kaimei dekiru ka), published by Iwanami Shoten
Associate Professor Saji is among the editors of the series "Cognitive Science of Language" (Kotoba no Ninchi Kagaku), published by Asakura Shoten
Associate Professor Saji contributed chapters to "Symbol Emergence Systems Theory: Toward Understanding 'Meaning' in the Coming AI-Coexistence Society" (Kigo Soshutsu Shisutemu-ron), published by Shin'yosha
ResearchResearch themes
The lab experimentally examines how word meanings arise and how they are acquired. It approaches the formation of meaning from two sides: perception through the body, and the culture that a society has built up.
*Illustrative imageHow Word Meanings Come to Be Shared
Even for the same word, what people picture differs slightly from person to person. Using both experiments and theory, the lab studies how children develop the ability to align the meanings of signs with other people, and how the qualities of sensation (qualia) relate to words.
*Illustrative imageYoung Children's Ability to Find Relations
Young children develop their ability to think by finding relations between objects. The lab investigates how play that involves searching for relations fosters an understanding of proportion, and how a child's tendency to focus intensely on one interest relates to temperament.
MembersFaculty
- Associate ProfessorNoburo Saji
VoicesStudent voices
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Report an errorAbout the images
The top and research theme images are illustrative and were not taken at the lab. They are cropped from Wikimedia Commons images. Cropped CC BY-SA images are provided under the same CC BY-SA license as the original (version shown on each line).
- Top image: “CSIRO ScienceImage 1853 Fabric Swatches” Textile and Fibre Technology, CSIRO / CC BY 3.0 (cropped)
- How Word Meanings Come to Be Shared: “Nani focused” Jbghimire / CC BY 3.0 (cropped)
- Young Children's Ability to Find Relations: “Brazil Child Care, children playing with blocks” Frontierofficial / CC BY 2.0 (cropped)
- Related lab (Toyama Lab): “Kamai Park Composite Playground Equipment” Harimawood / CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
- Related lab (Furuyama Lab): “Female Bunraku puppet Japan, early 20th century” Hiart / CC0 (cropped)
- Related lab (Sato Lab): “Hitane Elementary School classroom 1” Douglas P Perkins / CC BY 3.0 (cropped)
- Related lab (Yamada Lab): “Lake Seliger. Ostashkov. View of Voroniy Island” Александр Байдуков / CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
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