Reiko Mazuka, Associate Professor

Reiko Mazuka

Associate Professor
mailing address:
Duke University
417 Chapel Drive
Box 90086
Durham, NC 27708
email:
phone: (919) 660-5702

research interests | publications | curriculum vita

Research Summary:
 The purpose of our research is to shed light on our understanding of human brain development by investigating the process of acquisition of language skills, specifically in relation to phonological development. Since the sound system of a language is one of the first things infants learn, an examination of the initial stages of phonological acquisition can provide critical insight into how the human brain is structured to learn a language. In particular, as language prosody is an essential (perhaps the critical) key by which children first make sense of the structures of their languages, our program of research is designed to utilize the latest knowledge and technologies (such as Near Infrared Spectroscopy) to ascertain the course of development by which specific prosodic phenomena are naturally acquired.

Specialties:

Developmental Psychology

Representative Publications:   (More Publications)   (search)

  1. Mazuka, R. (1998). The Development of Language Processing Strategies: A cross-linguistic study between Japanese and English.. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  2. Mazuka, R., Nagai N. (Eds.) (1995). Japanese Sentence Processing.. Lawrence Erlbaum.
  3. Mazuka, R., Itoh, K., Kondo, T. "Cost of scrambling in Japanese sentence processing." Papers from International East Asian Psycholinguistics Workshop. Ed. M. Nakayama CSLI, Stanford, California, 2002
  4. Choi, Y., Mazuka, R., Akahane-Yamada, R. (2001). Korean and Japanese children’s production of English /l/ and /r/. Papers from the Workshop on Acquisition of East Asian Languages.
  5. Mazuka, R., Friedman, R. (2000). Linguistic relativity in Japanese and English: Is language the primary determinant in object classification?. Journal of East Asian Linguistics.
  6. Mazuka, R., Itoh, K., & Kondo, T. (1997). Processing down the Japanese garden-path sentences. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 26(2), 207-228.
  7. Misono, Y., Mazuka, R., Kondo, T., Kiritani, S. (1997). Effects and limitations of prosodic and semantic biases on syntactic ambiguity resolution of Japanese sentences. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 26(2), 229-245.
  8. Mazuka, R. "Can a grammatical parameter be set before the first word? Prosodic contributions to early setting of a grammatical parameter." Signal to Syntax: Bootstrapping from Speech to Grammar in Early Acquisition. Ed. J. Morgan, & K. Demuth Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996
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