Education

  • Ph.D., University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, 2016

Research Interests

  • Language acquisition
  • Second language acquisition
  • Heritage languages
  • Language processing
  • Japanese linguistics

Courses

  • J 101/102 Elementary Japanese
  • J 301/302 Third-Year Japanese
  • J 525 Teaching Japanese as a Foreign/Second Language
  • E 270 Japanese Language and Society

Awards

  • JCHAT Award (Best Paper), the 16th Annual International Conference of the Japanese Society for Language Sciences, 2014
  • East-West Center Association Summer Travel Grant, 2012
  • Japan Iron and Steel Federation/Mitsubishi Foundation Graduate Fellowship in Japanese Studies, Asian Studies Center, University of Pittsburgh, 2009-2011
  • Heiwa Nakajima Foundation Fellowship, 2009-2011
  • Ibuka Masaru Memorial Fund Scholarship, 2005-2009

Publication Highlights

  • Tanaka, Nozomi, William O’Grady, Kamil Deen, Chae-Eun Kim, Ryoko Hattori, Ivan Paul M. Bondoc, and Jennifer U. Soriano. 2016. An agent advantage in Tagalog relative clause comprehension. In AFLA 22: The Proceedings of the 22nd Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association , ed. by Henrison Hsieh, 191-202. Canberra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics.
  • Tanaka, Nozomi, and Yasuhiro Shirai. 2014. L1 acquisition of Japanese transitive verbs: How do children acquire grammar in the absence of clear evidence? In Japanese/Korean Linguistics (Vol. 21), eds. by Seungho Nam, Heejeong Ko, and Jongho Jun. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
  • Tanaka, Nozomi, William O’Grady, Kamil Deen, Chae-Eun Kim, Ryoko Hattori, Ivan Paul M. Bondoc, and Jennifer U. Soriano. 2014. Acquisition of Tagalog relative clauses. In BUCLD 38: Proceedings of the 38th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, eds. by Will Orman, and Matthew James Valleau, 463-470. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

My research interests focus on first and second language acquisition, as well as language processing. Using experimental methods, I investigate how different structures are understood and produced by children, adults, and second language learners. I am also interested in the acquisition and maintenance of heritage languages. I have primarily worked on Japanese and Tagalog, but I also hope to work on other languages of Asia and the Pacific, including the Ryukyuan languages.