[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.
