About me (my CV and google citations)
I am an assistant professor in the Cognitive Science
Department at Johns Hopkins University. I teach courses on psycholinguistics (with a main focus on sentence processing),
first language acquisition and second language acquisition.
I was born and brought up in a city called Hakodate in Hokkaido, Japan. In my spare time, I enjoy studying the magical taste of beer, wine and single malt whisky, as well as playing/watching soccer, skiing, and (badly) playing ukulele.
My research
My research combines psycholinguistics, first/second langauge acquisition and theoretical linguistics in trying to answer
the following questions:
- How do we construct abstract linguistic representations in real-time processing,
and how do language processing procedures vary across different languages?
- Despite their immature linguistic and cognitive capacities, how do children process the input, acquire linguistic knowledge,
and learn to use the knowledge efficiently in communication?
- What makes second language acquisition different from first language acquisition? What is the nature of the "critical period" phenomenon?
I investigate these questions in my language processing and development lab, primarily using behavioral experiments and eye-tracking techniques.
