NSF Young Investigator Award

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9357983 MAZUKA This award provides support to Dr. Reiko Mazuka under the National Science Foundation's Young Investigator Awards program. The objective of this program is to recognize outstanding young faculty in science and engineering, to enhance the academic career of recent PhD recipients by providing flexible support for research and educational activities, and to foster contact and cooperation between academia, industry, and institutions that support research and education. Dr. Mazuka has already made significant research contributions to the field of psycholinguistics, and she has the potential to become a leader in academic research and education. Over the last few years, Dr. Mazuka's cross-linguistic investigation of natural language processing has led to the conclusion that there are significant differences between the ways Japanese- and English-speaking children process language. This conclusion has critically challenged the hypothesis that mechanisms of natural language processing are universal. This award will allow the investigator to pursue her research interests in cross- linguistic comparisons of native Japanese and native English speakers. Dr. Mazuka will examine how Japanese speakers manage a high degree of indeterminacy early in a sentence, through a series of psycholinguistic experiments using methods of eye movement monitoring, self-paced reading, and on-line grammaticality judgments. Since the analysis of temporal ambiguity has critically shaped research in language processing, she will pay particular attention to the fact that English is a Right-Branching, Head- Initial language and Japanese is a Left-Branching, Head-Final language. The first year of the project will be conducted in Japan at the University of Tokyo and NTT Basic Research Labs. This research holds promise of forming a new interdisciplinary research paradigm in the theory of language-cognition relations and first language acquisition. In addition, the results of t he research will provide critical psycholinguistic data on Japanese sentence processing. ***