
Fields of Interest
Biography
Dr. Omaki's research focused on the intersection of language development and language comprehension/production at the sentence level. Sentence processing and language learning share the same problem: The target abstract structural representations must be identified despite the fact that a) input provides no direct evidence for the target syntactic representations, and b) there are many structural/grammatical hypotheses compatible with the input. Dr. Omaki was interested in how these identification processes are constrained by linguistic knowledge as well as cognitive mechanisms like attention and memory.
For more information about Dr. Omaki's research and the lab that he established, please visit the Language Development and Processing (LDP) Lab webpage below.
Research
Selected Research
- Atkinson, E., Apple, A., Rawlins, K., & Omaki, A. Similarity of wh-phrases and acceptability variation in wh-islands. Frontiers in Psychology, 6:2048. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01048
- Lane, C., Kanjila, S., Omaki, A., & Bedny, M. Visual cortex of congenitally blind adults responds to syntactic movement. The Journal of Neuroscience, 35, 12859-12867.
- National Science Foundation #BCS-1631993, “Executive control in sentence production”. PI: Nazbanou Nozari, Johns Hopkins University; Co-PI: Akira Omaki, University of Washington. $577,408. 2016-2019
- National Science Foundation #BCS-1423117, “Development and adaptation of active dependency completion mechanisms”. PI. $391,214. 2014-2018
Courses Taught
Dr. Omaki will be teaching LING 457, Language Development, in B-term of Summer Quarter 2016.