The studies of the Japanese language and psycholinguistics have advanced quite significantly in the last half century thanks to the progress in the study of cognition and brain mechanisms, and because of technological developments in experimental techniques. This volume contains 18 chapters that discuss the process of Japanese language acquisition as a first/second language and the mechanism of Japanese language perception and production.

This volume is the first comprehensive handbook of Japanese phonetics and phonology describing all the basic phonetic and phonological structures of modern Japanese with main focus on standard Tokyo Japanese. While reviewing important studies in the fields over the past century, it also presents a summary of interesting questions that remain unsolved in the literature. This book serves as a comprehensive guide to Japanese phonetics and phonology for all interested in linguistics and speech sciences including phonetic processing, speech perception and speech production.

This volume will be the first full-length exploration of the details of the history of the Japanese language written by experts in the different subfields of linguistics. The book will include the latest research on topics such as segmental phonology, accent, and focus constructions, showing how they contribute to a fuller understanding of the history of Japanese.

This volume is the first comprehensive survey of Japanese sociolinguistic studies. The topics in this volume cover major issues in sociolinguistics that also characterize features of Japanese. Such topics as gender, honorifics, and politeness are particularly pertinent to Japanese. The volume also includes studies on other topics such as social stratification, discourse, contact, and language policy.