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Masako Hirotani, SLaLS
Masako Hirotani’s research project advances our understanding of how humans process language and in particular, sentence structure. Specifically, Hirotani will investigate how sentences prior to the target sentence, or discourse contexts, are used in the real time processing of thematic information (i.e., information about who did what to whom). She will also examine the role that auditory information like intonation and pauses, called prosodic information, plays in facilitating thematic processing. Hirotani’s research also tracks how both eye-movement patterns and brain signatures of speakers of verb-initial and verb-final languages (e.g., English and Japanese, respectively) may differ when processing thematic role information.