Date: Sunday, January 27th
Time: 1:00 -2:00
Place: Kochi Women’s University, 2nd floor meeting room
Presenter: Dr. Yoko Nakano
Title: How do we comprehend sentences in L1 and L2?

Content:
Some L2 learners have achieved native-like proficiency in the target language. Recent psycholinguistic studies have reported that even highly advanced L2 learners process L2 sentences differently from native speakers. The talk will include methods to investigate how languages are processed in our brain, results and interpretations on L2 sentence processing studies on associating objects to their heads (verbs) and relative clauses to head nouns in L1 and L2 English and Japanese.
Biography:
Yoko Nakano is an Associate Professor in the Department of International Studies at Kochi University. Her first master’s degree was an M.A. in TESOL in 1991. She then investigated the interaction of L1 and L2 in the mental lexicon of advanced Japanese learners of English in New York for her M.Ed. in Applied Linguistics at Teachers College, Columbia University (1992). Since then she has been interested in the influence of memory on L1 and L2 language comprehension. She studied antecedent reactivation in Japanese scrambling constructions and the influence of working memory, which led to her PhD in Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics at the University of Essex in 2003. She is currently studying the interaction of working memory and L1 and L2 sentence processing with her students at Kochi University.