Principal Investigator
Karina Tachihara
Assistant Professor, Linguistics
Research Interests
Research in our group explores how we learn language by focusing on the cognitive mechanisms that enable, enhance, and disrupt the process of learning. We investigate how mechanisms that help us learn which constructions are acceptable and which are unacceptable may work differently for adults learning a new language, making learning what not to say particularly difficult. Ongoing projects in this area explore how input structure, learning environments, and modality affect learning unacceptability.
We are also interested in how semantic knowledge shapes the organization of production. By looking at naturalistic production data, we can better understand how concepts are structured in the mind and how this structure helps us organize our thoughts and speech.
We use a combination of psycholinguistic tasks measuring acceptability, comprehension, production, and memory as well as computational tools such as machine learning and large language models to better understand how we learn and use language.
I have worked in English, Spanish, and Japanese in the past, but I hope to expand to more languages in the future! I also speak Portuguese and am interested in learning Hindi next.