At my favorite beach Lanikai, Hawaii, 2008


Akira Omaki

Department of Linguistics
1401 Marie Mount Hall
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742

Phone: (301) 405-8306
fax: (301) 405-7104
email: {mylastname/at/umd/dot/edu}


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[About me] - click here to see my CV (in pdf, last edited March 2009)

I am a fourth-year PhD student at the University of Maryland Linguistics Department. My current adviser is Colin Phillips, but I also get a lot of guidance from Jeff Lidz on my work with children.

Before I came here, I did my MA (advisor: Bonnie D. Schwartz) in the Department of Second Language Studies (SLS) at the University of Hawai'i, and BA in English/Linguistics at Sophia University (Tokyo, Japan).

I grew up in a city called Hakodate in Hokkaido, Japan. I love Hakodate! If you have a chance to visit Hokkaido, please visit there- you'll love the great seafood (especially squid!), beautiful nightview from Mt. Hakodate, Yunokawa hot springs, streetcars, and the scenic streets with European-style buildings.

I also like cooking, eating out at restaurants, drinking (especially beer, wine and single malt whisky), as well as playing my lovely ukulele.

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[My research interests]
(see the Research page for on-going projects & publications/presentations)

My research projects range from sentence processing to first or second language acquisition as well as theoretical syntax, but they are all driven by one question: How do language learners process the input and acquire the grammar of their target language while having a non-target-like grammar? Just saying "Oh, innate knowledge helps" is no sufficient answer, and a serious inquiry into this question requires one to look into a) the nature of learners' linguistic knowledge and the target linguistic representation, b) the mechanism of sentence processing in language learners, and c) how these two things interact in order for language development to take place.

As a first step to this problem, one of my current major projects focuses on investigatiosns of child language processing, in particular on processing of wh-dependencies in children. Using a visual world eye-tracking method, we are investigating whether children actively complete long-distance dependencies like adults do, and if not, when such processing behaviors emerge. Finding out a developmental profile of active comprehension will not only shed light on the nature of the predictive mechanism in sentence processing, but also allow us to examine how or whether processing failures caused by such risky parsing affects language development.

In relation to the psycholinguistic development in children, I'm also getting interested in child brain development and how that informs language development. You can find a review paper on child EEG research I wrote with David Poeppel on the Research page.