- Title：Professor
- Degree：Ph.D. in Linguistics (Phonetics) (University of Edinburgh)
- Directed Research：Speech Communication and Language Acquisition
- Research Field：Phonetics, Phonology, Language Acquisition, Speech Science
Biography
After graduating, I worked as an English language teacher at high school for a few years, but then I switched my academic discipline and did an M.A. in Phonetics at University College London, followed by a Ph.D. in Linguistics (Phonetics) at the University of Edinburgh. After that, I taught at the Universities of Stirling, Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland before returning to Japan to teach at Waseda University.
I am interested in both theoretical and practical aspects of language and language acquisition. My main research interests are in phonetics and phonology, especially speech production and perception with a strong focus on acoustic studies, and second(+) language phonological acquisition of various languages. Recently, I have been participating in various research projects both as a project leader and as a collaborator, including building speech corpora of Asian language speakers of English, evaluating foreign accentedness of English and Japanese, assessing comprehensibility of different varieties of English including Asian and African varieties, investigating communication between non-native speakers, helping to develop computer-assisted pronunciation training systems of English and Japanese, and pop-out voice in different noise environments. I have published many book chapters, journal articles and conference papers, edited and written the phonology section of a linguistic dictionary, as well as giving many conference presentations.
I am the director of Waseda University Institute of Language and Speech Science. The institute has hosted several domestic and international conferences, and it has a phonetics laboratory equipped with two soundproof rooms and other experimental facilities. I am also currently the head of the International Exchange Committee of the Phonetic Society of Japan.
Major Works / Publications Awards
https://w-rdb.waseda.jp/html/100000565_en.html
Directed Research
This seminar will focus on theories and application of speech communication science and language acquisition. There is a strong focus on experimental studies of phonetics and phonology, but it also covers other linguistic areas such as psycholinguistics, pragmatics, corpus linguistics, application of linguistic and acquisition theories for education.
Student research areas include, but are not limited to, phonetics, phonology, interface between phonetics phonology and pragmatics-phonology, and language acquisition of various combinations of first and second (+) languages; examples of languages studied by current and past students include Chinese, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Taiwanese, Thai and Vietnamese.
We will seek interdisciplinary approaches to build up research potentials. In the seminar, students will read and discuss relevant journal articles. In addition, students will learn the practical and analytical skills they need to conduct their research as well as techniques to analyse the data they collect.
