Congratulations to Dr. Hirotani, one of the 2011 recipients of a Faculty of Arts and Social Science Research Award for Junior Faculty.
The following is an abstract of her planned research.
Neural Investigation of Language Processing
– Masako Hirotani
Language plays a critical role in our daily life and having full command of our language faculties provides us with many valuable social advantages. In fact, so important are these faculties that, if we lose or experience difficulty with any one of them, the consequences to our mental health can be catastrophic. Therefore, it is essential that reliable interventions be developed to counter these difficulties when they occur.
We believe that our research into language processing will contribute significantly to the development of these interventions and has the potential to benefit a wide variety of people experiencing language difficulties.
Specifically, our research will investigate the neurological basis for computing the meaning of a sentence.
Using Event Related Potentials (ERP) or ‘brain waves’, a temporal measure of brain activity, and neuroimaging (fMRI) techniques, a standard method of examining brain regions recruited during sentence comprehension, we will carry out two sets of experiments. This work will examine: 1) the comprehension of modal sentences and 2) the interpretation of negation. We have chosen to target these two measures because they bring together a distinct and particularly useful interaction between structure and context in the interpretation of sentences.
Lastly, in addition to the actual experimentation itself, this research effort seeks to create an interdisciplinary network of researchers, both domestic and international (Germany, Japan, and US), who are interested in the same topic (linguists, psycholinguists, psychologists, neuroscientists, and speech-language pathologists). Such a diverse research team is indispensable when tackling the complex and multi-faceted questions found in the field of language processing.