About

My research interests focus on the long-lasting discussion on LANGUAGE AND THOUGHTS. I started and am continuing my research career by mainly working on verb learning, from the perspective of language learners' learning on the relationship between event representation/conceptualization and linguistic properties, i.e., word-object mapping as addressed in Quine (1960).

I am specially interested in how language learners acquire inherent conceptual distinctions through languages (see Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997), such as what strategies they apply to differentiate ambiguous word meanings (e.g., Syntactic Bootstrapping in Landau & Gleitman, 1985; or Morphological Bootstrapping in Behrend, 1990, Behrend et al., 1995), and how this learning process interacts with surrounding physical world (e.g., how instruments affect verb categorization, see Wang, Hong & Saji, 2018) and pragmatic contexts (e.g., audience effect, see Do, Papafragou & Trueswell, 2020).

I have research experiences with Mandarin-speaking, Japanese-speaking native adults, L2 Japanese learners and Mandarin-speaking children in Mainland China (both urban and rural areas) and Japan. I am deeply grateful to all the individuals who have inspired, guided, and supported me throughout this research journey. I welcome any academic contact at any time in any form.

News

• Nov 2026Poster (upcoming) at the 51st Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 51), Boston.
• Apr 2026Started teaching Introduction to Academic Skills at Showa Pharmaceutical University.
• Oct 2025Started teaching Psychology of Language and Learning at Tokyo Gakugei University.
• Aug 2025Presented a poster at the 22nd European Conference on Developmental Psychology (ECDP 2025) in Vilnius.
• Apr 2024Started my PhD at the University of Tokyo and was awarded the UTokyo SPRING-GX Fellowship.