Akira Omaki

Akira Omaki is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington. His research focuses on the intersection of language development and sentence-level language processing, particularly how abstract structural representations are identified despite ambiguous input and multiple grammatical hypotheses. Dr. Omaki established the Language Development and Processing (LDP) Lab, where he investigates constraints from linguistic knowledge and cognitive mechanisms like attention and memory.

• Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Maryland (2010)
• Co-PI on NSF grant #BCS-1631993 (2016-2019)
• PI on NSF grant #BCS-1423117 (2014-2018)
• Taught LING 457: Language Development (Summer 2016)

Dr. Omaki's research explores:

• Active dependency completion mechanisms
• Syntactic representations in comprehension/production
• Language learning under uncertainty
• Cognitive-linguistic interactions
• Neural basis of syntactic processing

His publications include studies on wh-island acceptability and visual cortex activation in syntactic tasks. Current projects examine executive control in sentence production and grammatical adaptation mechanisms.

Advising: Mentored graduate students including Alli Germain, whose dissertation addressed non-nominative subjects in Russian and Lithuanian. Grants: Secured over $968,000 in NSF funding for language processing research.