Utako Minai
Employment
- 8/2015 - present: Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Kansas
- 8/2009 - 7/2015: Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Kansas
- 7/2006 - 7/2009: Research Scientist, Laboratory for Language Development, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan
Education
- 2006: Ph.D. in Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
- 2001: M.A. in English linguistics, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan
- 1997: B.A. in English linguistics, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan
- 1995: B.A. in Communication studies, Tokyo Woman's Christian University, Japan
Research
- Research areas
- First language acquisition
- Child language processing
- Developmental psycholinguistics
- Research interests
- Logico-semantic competence in child language: Logical word learning (mapping between linguistic forms and logical content); Meaning composition (computation of phrasal/sentential meaning); Meaning comparison (computation of inferential meaning across phrases/sentences)
- Developmental aspects of sentence processing: Incremental computation of meaning; Effects of the interaction among syntax, semantics and prosodic structure; Interaction between online meaning computation and cognitive development
- Cross-linguistic research on language acquisition and processing of meaning; Acquisition and processing of language-universal and language-specific aspects of meaning; Investigation of children's use of language-specific cues in language processing
- Adults' meaning processing in their first and second languages
- Methodological approach: Experimental
- Linguistic comprehension tasks (e.g., Truth Value Judgment Task, Picture Selection Task, Demand-fulfillment Task)
- Cognitive tasks (e.g., Executive Function measurements, Theory of Mind measurements)
- Visual world eye-tracking paradigm (using Eyelink1000 by SR Research)
- Languages of research
- English
- Japanese
- Mandarin Chinese
- Turkish