Overview
Language acquisition and psycholinguistics. In
particular, she is interested in the development and
consequences of acquiring very different types of
languages. The research has taken a cross-linguistic
approach between English and Japanese, and her
current research involves the following three areas: (1)
study of sentence comprehension strategies by adult
and child speakers of Japanese and English; (2) cross-
linguistic study of infants' speech perception; and (3)
influence of acquiring language specific categories on
cognition.
Current Duke Appointments & Affiliations
Research Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
·
2013 - Present
Psychology & Neuroscience,
Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Recent Scholarly Works
Hemodynamic Responses to Word Forms in Japanese Infant-Directed Vocabulary in 5- and 9-Month-Old Infants: Early Sensitivity to Prosodic Structure and Emergence of Prosodic Representations.
Journal article Developmental science · July 2026 The prosodic characteristics of a native language greatly influence early language acquisition. Yet, Japanese mothers are known to use a specific prosodic structure in infant-directed vocabulary (IDV)-specifically, three-mora, two-syllable words with a hea ... Full text CiteUnique Challenges Faced by Global Developmental Scientists During Peer-Review: A Survey Study.
Journal article Developmental science · May 2026 Advancing generalizability, replicability, and public trust in developmental science requires testing theories across diverse contexts and disseminating findings widely. Yet researchers based outside the USA or studying non-USA samples (non-USA based resea ... Full text CiteEarly influence of language experience in non-native speech perception: Discrimination of three-way Thai stop contrasts by Korean and Japanese infants.
Journal article Infant behavior & development · March 2025 Young infants' remarkable ability to discriminate non-native phoneme contrasts played a critical role in shaping the tenets of the perceptual narrowing hypothesis: early on, infants are sensitive to most phoneme categories, including those not used in thei ... Full text CiteRecent Grants
Learning to Pay Attention to Language Related Visual Cues
ResearchCo Investigator · Awarded by RIKEN Brain Science Institute · 2009 - 2023Doctoral Dissertation Research: Young Children's use of Prosody in Disambiguating Sentences: The Case of Korean Children
ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by National Science Foundation · 2002 - 2003Sentence Processing in Japanese and English
ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) · 1994 - 2001View All Grants
Education
Cornell University ·
1990
Ph.D.
University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom) ·
1984
M.S.