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}


Home
Research
Teaching


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



I am a 5th-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 single malt whisky, wine and beer), as well as playing my lovely ukulele.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

My research projects include 1) adult and child sentence processing, 2) first and second language acquisition as well as 3) theoretical syntax, but they are all driven by one question: How do adults and children process the input and construct rich syntactic representations in real-time comprehension, and based on those representations, how do they acquire the grammar of their target language in the course of first/second language acquisition? A serious inquiry into this question requires one to look into the nature of linguistic systems, the mechanism of sentence processing in adult native speakers and language learners, and 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 active dependency completion in adult and child language processing, in particular on processing of wh-dependencies. 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.