[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.
